Last Updated: July 2023
Currently, some states require all parents to pay child support while their child is in foster care, though federal law only requires that states issue orders to Title IV-E families. However, research shows that requiring families to reimburse the state and federal governments for the costs of foster care services is a harmful practice. Because of the federal requirement and the fact that most parents whose children are placed in foster care are struggling financially, fees fall heavily on families with very low incomes. This compounds their economic hardship– interfering with families’ abilities to climb out of poverty and provide for their children– and delays family reunification. Even after reunification, debilitating debt from unpaid child support can accumulate. Lastly, studies show that more dollars are spent pursuing collections than are collected.
Advocates should urge states to end these harmful child support policies and ensure that families are not burdened with child support debt following reunification. Guidance from the Health and Human Services (HHS) Administration for Children & Families in 2022 allows states to end the harmful practice of charging parents for costs associated with their child being in foster care. This would also help ameliorate racial disparities—the fees’ targeting of parents with low incomes disproportionately affects parents of color, and the child welfare system also has existing racial disparities.
Key Resources:
States Should Use New Guidance to Stop Charging Parents for Foster Care, Prioritize Family Reunification: This CBPP report examines guidance from HHS released in 2022 that allows states to end the practice of changing parents for costs associated with foster care. It also provides an in-depth overview of how charging parents delays family reunification and exacerbates racial disparities, as well as how efforts to collect child support are often not cost-effective.
Joint Letter Regarding the Assignment of Rights to Child Support for Children in Foster Care: This is a joint letter from the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Children’s Bureau (CB) and Office of Child Support Enforcement (OSCE) that was released in 2022 to announce their updated guidance, which recommended states to only collect child support payments from parents whose child(ren) receives foster care maintenance payments in very rare instances. The letter outlines their rationale behind this decision. State advocates can utilize this letter as a reference framework when crafting talking points for state legislators or agency administrators.
States bill parents for the cost of foster care, keeping families apart: This investigative piece by NPR tracks the story of Daisy Hohman—a mother of three in Minnesota who received a 19k bill after her kids were placed into foster care for 20 months—and synthesizes information from state and federal sources. It illustrates how charging parents for foster care creates a vicious cycle and is not cost effective for local governments.
Making parents pay: The unintended consequences of charging parents for foster care: This study examines the state of Wisconsin—which functions as a natural experiment because of the state’s large regional variation in child support referral policy—to estimate the effect of child support assignment on the duration of a child’s out-of-home foster care placement. The authors ultimately found that requiring parents to pay support to reimburse costs of foster care delays family reunification.
Washington’s Cost Effectiveness for FC collections: This one-pager provides calculations of the cost-effectiveness of collecting child support from foster care cases in the state of Washington, for the fiscal year of 2018. It ultimately calculated that for every dollar spent for foster care cases, Washington only collected $0.39.