This chapter consolidates previous child support research that has developed typologies of legal or policy forms (Skinner et al, 2007; Beaumont et al, 2014; Walker, 2015). It adds a critical social science perspective by examining the social problems that child support law and policy purportedly seek to resolve, marking out for whom this is a problem, and where solutions to this problem purportedly lie. The purpose is to outline how child support has been categorised and conceptualised in previous research, but moves beyond these descriptive, administrative accounts, to examine how it intersects with changing normative paradigms, namely evolving work and income assumptions, the continuation and discontinuation of the gender contract, and increasing diversity in family forms.

What the three variables used in child support determinations – namely income, care-time and family forms – foreground is either the ‘blindness’ of systems to these issues, or the complexity of data required to sufficiently address variations to these within child support orders. Some countries do not seek to respond to these changes, operating a one-time ‘set and forget’ model that ignores changing circumstances rather than dealing with them effectively. However, for other countries these issues are not limited to the setting of a child support order. Over the life of a child support order, there can be enormous complexity built into the system if it seeks to respond to changing income, care-time and family patterns. For all systems, whether they recognise or ignore the inequities created by changing income, care-time and family forms, the bad news is that social trends are making these issues increasingly relevant and increasingly variable. This variability exacerbates the data needs and procedural demands existing within child support systems that respond to these changes, and exacerbates the inequities caused by ignoring them.

Types of child support internationally

Historically, child support has existed in some form well before administrative systems were introduced. Court-compelled financial support for children whose father had left the family unit has existed in some contexts for centuries. For example, in many countries, legal notions of family responsibility governed the payment of monies across households in instances of abandoned wives (Simmonds, 2016).