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Product Description: Successful social policies for children are critical to America's future. Yet the status of children in America suggests that the nation's policies may not be serving them well. Infant and child mortality rates in the U.S. remain high compared to other western industrialized nations; child poverty rates have worsened in the past decade; poor health care, child abuse, and inadequate schooling and child care persist...read more

Vast reforms of the child support system following the passage of the Family Support Act of 1988 will affect half of America's children. This book analyses the possible effects that profound legislative change will have on child support payments and child well-being.

Product Description: In the United States, rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are climbing so dramatically that over half of the next generation is likely to spend part of its childhood in single-mother families. As many as half of these families will live in poverty, caused in large measure by the failure of current government regulations to secure adequate child support from absent parents and to assure minimum support when parents cannot provide it...read more

The real frontier [in the welfare reform process] is in the Wisconsin state capital, Madison, at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty. -Barbara Bergman, 1987 Bergman is referring to the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty's seminal effort to work with the State of Wisconsin to design and implement a new child support assurance system (CSAS), and to estimate its costs and benefits. The objective of the CSAS is to hold noncustodial parents to their child support obligations while at the same time guaranteeing a minimum assured benefit to single-parent families. Included in this volume are the major research products of that effort, plus several chapters commissioned specifically for this volume.

Product Description: Almost everyone would like to see the enactment of sound, practical measures to help disadvantaged people get off welfare and find jobs at decent wages, and over the past quarter-century federal and state governments have struggled to develop just such programs...read more

Product Description: The proportion of children living in households headed by single women is more than one in five. There is concern (and some evidence) that children of single parents are less likely to be successful adults. The book discusses the trends in public debate about this problem...read more