Child Support

After you hit a certain age and don’t have any kids and none on the way people start asking when you plan on having them. This is especially true if you happened to be a woman. I don’t know why it’s more expected of a woman to have kids than a man, especially since we can’t create them by ourselves. But at any rate, I was thinking about child support and why some women have more trouble with money than others, when they are receiving child support.

I hear complaints all the time about how child support is not enough to pay for this, and that. And I honestly couldn’t say for sure whether it is or isn’t since I don’t have any children and hopefully will never be in the predicament to be getting a child support check. But the common complaint, at any rate, is that the money just is not enough. My question is “Why isn’t it enough”? I always thought that child support was for the child. To me this means, money for daycare if needed, food, clothes, doctors’ bills etc. Obviously not true, these days as I see more and more women complain that their child support checks aren’t enough to pay for things that they really shouldn’t be using child support money for.

I’m not talking about your average everyday hood rat that uses her child support money to get her hair and nails done. I’m referring to those who use some of their child support to pay general bills or pay the rent. It is these things that I believe a mother or father should be able to pay without using any of the money they get in child support. I believe if at anytime you have to use child support money for bills, then I guess it’s not going to be enough. When child support is allocated it is done so that they give an allowance to the child, not the parent and the child. Meaning the money granted is only enough to pay the extra cost of having a child. Not the regular cost a person would have regardless of if they had a child or not.

There’s only one circumstance where child support should be used for rent. That’s when a parent has to move or pay rent for an extra room for the child. Needless to say that a two-bedroom apartment is going to cost more than a one bedroom. The parent would have to pay rent for a one bedroom regardless, now if having an extra bedroom is going to cost $50 more a month then using $50 from a child support check is justified. But when you use $150 for extra rent, $80 for a phone bill, and then the electric is $60 and you only get $250 every two weeks, it’s never going to be enough.

The problem I think is that some parents receiving child support expect it to take care of them and the child. The parent with the custodial rights to the child ideally should be working anyway and making enough to take care of any bills that they are going to incur. If however they can’t work, or don’t make enough money to take care of their own basic necessities than they really don’t have the right to complain because it is their own fault that the money doesn’t go as far as it should. Point blank, they are not carrying their own weight. The child is paying for things that the parent should be able to pay for.