Trends in Paternity Adjudications and Child Support Awards

Welfare caseloads are increasingly made up of never-married mothers and their children. Of all single-parent families, these families are the least likely to receive child support from the children's father. We attempt to measure the extent to which changes in legal policy have generated improvement in establishing paternity and obtaining child support orders for this group of families. We construct crude time series of the ratios of paternity adjudications to out-of-wedlock births and then we use Census data to test whether any improvements in obtaining child support result from changes in the demographic characteristics of never-married women. We find that improvement is chiefly due to legal changes. Despite improvement, however, adjudication rates and rates of obtaining child support orders are very low. In 1986, 66 percent of all potentially eligible children born to never-married mothers between 1980 and 1986 were without the legal basis for a child support award. TRENDS IN PATERNITY ADJUDICATIONS AND CHILD SUPPORT AWARDS