Moms less likely to pay child support than Dads

This should already be a well know fact to my readers but on an NPR show, they finally heard the truth:

The number of dollars of unpaid child support each year in the U.S. is well into the billions. NPR’s Rachel Martin speaks with data expert Mona Chalabi of FiveThirtyEight.com about the numbers.

MARTIN: That is the total amount of unpaid child support in the United States in the year 2011. Mona Chalabi joins us from our studios in New York to unpack this number. Hey, Mona.

MONA CHALABI: Hi, Rachel.

MARTIN: So that’s a huge amount of unpaid child support. What do we know about how many parents are affected, and who are they?

CHALABI: Well, we actually know quite a bit. So the spreadsheet I’m looking at here comes from the Census Bureau in 2011. That’s the most recent year that we have. And they provide a pretty specific definition of custodial parents. Those are parents that are taking care of their kids while the other parent lives someplace else.

CHALABI: Yeah. I was surprised too. So in 2011, we found that 32 percent of custodial fathers didn’t receive any of the child support that had been awarded to them compared to 25 percent of custodial moms. Now the first and most obvious thing to say about all of this is that there are way more custodial moms in America than custodial dads. They actually outnumber them 5 to 1. And on top of that, moms are also more likely than dads to get awarded child support. But still…

Gee, what a surprise!