Elaine Sorensen and Ariel Halpern

Fathers who shun financial responsibility for their children have been tagged “deadbeat dads” by welfare reformers. Reformers regard the behavior of these men as a major factor in child poverty and welfare costs. In the following viewpoint, Elaine Sorensen and Ariel Halpern maintain that aggressive collection of child support from these fathers is enabling more single mothers to move away from public assistance toward self-sufficiency. In addition to making child support enforcement available to all families, states have established programs to make paternity evasion more difficult for fathers, according to the authors. Sorensen is a labor economist and Halpern is a research associate at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan domestic policy research organization.

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