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Some states have mandatory percentages of income they use for calculating child support. Some states take both parents income levels into consideration when calculating child support. Frankly, it depends on the state. The one time I tried to get child support enforced by two different states, they basically told me to forget it, not going to happen, since it takes sometimes months of employment in a new place for the state to catch the fact that the SSN matches a deadbeat dad, and to start garnishing wages. Most of the true deadbeats will simply quit and go to work somewhere else as soon as the garnishes start coming out.
My son will be 15 in March, and for the last 13 years, I've paid all his bills. I'm a lot luckier than most women, that's for sure. If I was a secretary or a teacher or something like that, I don't know what the hell I'd have done to keep a roof over our heads and mac and cheese on the table.
The child support system needs a reform at the lowest level and the highest... seems to me that these are the non-custodial parent situations where the shit is the worst.
My dad stayed behind on his child support when we were kids, I don't know how my mom managed, since she was a restaurant manager. If I'd worked the long hours she did to support us, I'd have probably gone nuts. She was lucky that we were old enough not to require daycare or babysitters or anything like that, otherwise she probably wouldn't have been able to support us. This was before the days of wage garnishment, and my dad always seemed to be able to go on vacations, trips, things like that. Alot of the times he took us along, and we had fun, but looking back, I think we'd have been way better served with my mom getting her child support instead of us going on vacation.
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