This chapter returns to Jamrozik and Nocella's (1998) theory of the residualisation of social problems into technical and personal concerns, locating the evolution of purportedly ‘advanced’ child support systems within Li's (2007) process of ‘rendering technical’. The purpose is to identify how the social problems that child support purportedly solves are translated into a series of technical criteria, procedures and formulae that draw attention away from the issues at hand. At the same time, it is women as recipients of child support who have to enact these technical measures. In doing so, women are rendered responsible for the ‘correct’ enactment of the system, despite the system often failing to deliver child support payments as a result.

Through child support, the problem of single parents’ and their children's poverty is positioned as possible to address by increasing non-resident parent responsibility for providing direct payments, pursuing non-resident parent contributions to the state to subsidise increased benefit provisions, or a combination of both. However, these techniques add another layer of complexity to understanding the ‘problem’ to be solved and move the critical gaze away from the underlying social problem to focus on the technical means. Child poverty is obscured from the gaze of researchers and governments, who instead focus on technical and operational concerns. For example, in the US, which leads the world in the technical management of child support, governments and thus researchers focus on such issues as ‘right sizing orders’, determining under what conditions fathers are more likely to pay, and at what point compliance measures move from being motivational to punitive (Oldham and Smyth, 2018; Cancian et al, 2019; Hodges et al, 2020; Vogel, 2020a, 2020b). These concerns shift the focus away from the ‘feminist’ concerns that led to the establishment of child support programmes and move them into the gaze of the masculine bureaucracy, legal system or policy process. Within these systems, the concern of government becomes not one of children's financial welfare, but one of reducing welfare expenditure and, implicitly, working to buttress men's financial autonomy and discretion.

The prioritisation of technical concerns sees such changes as the introduction of paternity tests and legal hurdles to ensure women are not inappropriately claiming, caps on and amendments to child support formulae to ensure the ‘right sizing’ of orders to meet men's needs, and the ‘clawback’ of child support to recoup benefit expenditures.