Bargaining in the shadow of the child support agency? cooperative versus coercive private arrangements.

There is a notable lack of empirical data on the prevalence of private child support arrangements and the dynamics surrounding them. This article examines the reasons some non-resident fathers give for paying more than their ‘official’ child support obligation, as well as the reasons some resident mothers report accepting lower payments. We analyse data from 733 separated parents registered with the Child Support Agency surveyed as part of a large national study conducted in early 2008. One quarter (n=185) of respondents reported paying more, or taking less, child support than was due. As might be expected, the majority of those private child support arrangements appeared to occur in cases where the Child Support Agency was not responsible for collecting payments. Our data suggest that private child support arrangements may be more widespread than previously discussed, and can be motivated by the desire to: (a) protect or encourage parent–child contact; (b) stop fights over parenting arrangements; (c) improve the perceived fairness of payments — or some combination of these. Our data also suggest that female payees were more likely to report feeling intimidated and/or pressured to take less child support than male payers who reported paying over and above their child support assessment. These pre-reform data raise the spectre that coercion may underpin a number of private child support arrangements, and that some male payers may be informally paying extra child support in order to have regular contact with their children.