The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [61]
Joint custody can have another serious financial side effect on a woman: She may end up with less child support. With both parents providing a home for their children, courts are less inclined to order that child support flow in a single predetermined direction, from Dad to Mom. One study found that judges are three times more likely to order no child support under a joint custody case than a case where the mother is awarded sole custody.50 Joint custody may be the best way to involve fathers in their children’s lives, but it is no financial promised land for either single parent.
Tapped Out
Divorced fathers have become a kind of mythic solution. Anyone concerned about the financial distress of single mothers simply joins in the rallying cry to “Make dads pay more.” Once again, we offer sobering data. There is substantial evidence that millions of fathers are already struggling to make their current payments and may not be able to pay more, regardless of what the courts order. Only 46 percent of divorced fathers own their own homes, a rate that is about half that of married fathers generally. Divorced fathers are also less likely to own a car.51 Indeed, one out of three unmarried, nonresident fathers cannot even maintain their own household and live with their parents or other extended family.52
Even more tellingly, our data indicate that unmarried mothers aren’t the only ones filing for bankruptcy in record numbers. Divorced dads are in just about as much trouble. We estimate that more than 160,000 men with child support and alimony obligations will end up in bankruptcy this year alone. This means that fathers who owe child support are more than three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than single men who don’t owe support.53 Indeed, nonresident fathers with child support obligations are the only group that approaches single mothers in their extraordinarily high levels of financial distress.
These men are caught in the same financial maelstrom as their ex-wives. They must come up with money for an apartment and all the accoutrements of their newly single lives, not to mention thousands of dollars in legal fees, but they too have nothing in savings to cover these costs. Like their soon-to-be ex-wives, many turn to debt to get through the months following the divorce. Brad Pritchard is already a few thousand dollars in the hole, and bankruptcy may be just around the corner. “I was brought up that you sign your name, you pay your bills. Period. But if things keep on this way, I just don’t know. . . .”
Men like Brad Pritchard do not file for bankruptcy as a way of ducking out of their support obligations. Bankruptcy law is quite firm on this point. All child support and alimony orders survive a bankruptcy filing 100 percent intact. These men may escape their credit card debts and outstanding medical bills, and they may slide out from underneath some business debts or drop their car loans (if they give up their cars), but they cannot reduce their current or past-due child support obligations by a single penny. So why do they file? Many of them are in the bankruptcy courts to shake off Citibank and Ford Motor Credit so they can free up the money they need to fulfill their obligations to their children. Congressman Henry Hyde and his cronies may charge that these men suffer “an absence of personal responsibility,” but for many, filing for bankruptcy may be the most responsible thing these divorced fathers can do for their children.54
A Lesson from the Two-Parent Family
The illusion that dads can pay enough to stabilize the broken family is born partly of hope and partly of despair. If Dad can’t pay more, how does the single mother ever escape the Two-Income Trap? For that matter, how does the divorced father break free? They do it the same way the dual-income