Who Pays for the Kids? The Price of Motherhood, Chapter 9

Oh, the child support system...only viewed as monetary, never in terms of time or care of the child. Mother's beware, your in for a scare if divorce should ever occur. “Indeed the working mother who decides to care for her offspring, rather than maximize her income, should expect to see her child punished with lower support from the father if divorce or separation occurs,” (p. 163).

I remember having dance the child support tango. My daughter and I needed medical care, once we had that provided the state needed someone to absorb the cost. It didn't matter the my daughter's dad spent time with her, paid for her diapers, and helped around the house... he still had to pay up because he was assumed to be a dead beat. Things didn't work out romantically for our relationship, but we have always made everything we do about our daughter, and I have never “taken her away” from him.

My daughter's dad is now in another pickle as he met and fell hard for a young woman he worked with. They were off and on for a while, tangled in intensity. She became pregnant with twins last October and miscarried after the first month. They turned around and got pregnant again, immediately after the loss. The new baby was born in September. This woman did not let her baby's father be there for the birth, wouldn't accept help during her pregnancy, and now that the baby is almost six months, the number of times she has let baby's dad see her can be counted on one hand.

The situation has been almost the same for my daughter's dad and his child-rearing experience. However, anger has been largely left out of the picture for our situation, and has been harboring in the second. I know too much to not let my daughter see her dad, and I have no reason to not let her see him. They are close, she loves him, and I love him because of how much he loves her. So now he is stuck paying almost six hundred dollars a month in child support, one for a child he sees, the other he doesn't. Why does the government assume that a father does not want to see his child and that the only way a father knows how to rear a child is through monetary means? If time was valued as much as money, our society would be a little richer and our daughter's would be a lot healthier.