Family Formation, Child Costs, and Child Support

1. Fifty years of family formation

The U.S. total fertility rate fell from about 2.48 births per woman in 1970 to roughly 1.62 in 2023, and the marriage rate per 1,000 people fell from about 10.6 to the 5–6 range over the same span. [4]

Researchers attribute this broad decline mainly to later and less-frequent marriage, rising education, economic uncertainty, and shifting norms — not to any single policy. The decline appears across income and education groups, which matters for the question later on this page.

2. Where single fathers fit

Single (father-only) households are a real but minority arrangement. In 2023 there were about 2.5 million father-only households out of 9.8 million one-parent households; in 2022, father-only family groups numbered about 2.23 million (2.5% of family groups) versus 8.66 million mother-only (9.7%) — roughly a 4-to-1 ratio of single mothers to single fathers. Married parents were 65% of family groups with children. [1, 2] Father-only households have grown from a few hundred thousand in 1970 to ~2.5 million today.

3. Wisconsin’s award standard

Wisconsin uses a percentage-of-income standard (Admin. Code DCF 150, mandated by Wis. Stat. § 49.22(9)): a fixed share of the payer’s gross income — 17% for one child, 25% for two, 29% for three, 31% for four, and 34% for five or more. [7, 9] For higher earners the marginal percentage steps down: the standard rate applies below $7,000/month, a reduced band (14–27%) applies from $7,000 to $12,500/month, and a further-reduced band (10–20%) applies above $12,500/month. [8]

This is the award standard. Whether it becomes public enforcement (a Title IV-D case, mandatory when a family receives public assistance) or stays a private, court-approved arrangement is a separate question — and a child’s right to support can’t be waived by the parents. See Public vs. private (IV-D ≠ IV-E).

4. Award vs. what a child costs

Here is the comparison that drives most of the debate. For one child, we place the Wisconsin guideline award (the percentage-of-income standard at each income tier) next to two independent estimates of what a child costs per year: the USDA figure (a spending-based estimate of household outlays attributable to a child) and the Comanor figure (an economic marginal-cost estimate — the added cost of one more child). [10, 11]

Two things stand out. The guideline award tracks the USDA spending-based cost fairly closely (below it at lower incomes, roughly even at higher incomes). But it runs about 1.8–2.7× the Comanor economic cost — because guidelines are built from how much households spend on children, which the Comanor line argues overstates the true added cost of a child. Whether the award is “right” therefore depends on which definition of “cost” you accept, and the award is a share of the payer’s income rather than a direct measure of the child’s needs.

Simplifying assumptions: one child; award = the DCF 150 percentage applied to the listed gross income (with the high-income marginal steps); USDA/Comanor figures are the published per-child annual costs at comparable income levels [10, 11]. Real orders adjust for placement time, health and child-care costs, and other factors, so a specific case can differ substantially.

5. Does support burden change behavior?

The specific claim — that a heavy or unrealistic support obligation deters people from having children while unmarried or divorced — gets narrow, mechanism-specific support in the peer-reviewed literature, and no support as an explanation for the broad fertility decline.

• Stronger enforcement correlates with less unwed childbearing. Plotnick et al. (JPAM 2007) and Huang (Social Service Review 2002) find that in states with stronger child-support enforcement, nonmarital births are lower — and they model the driver as a deterrent on men: enforcement raises the expected cost of unwed fatherhood. [12, 13] That is the part of the data most consistent with the “support liability changes men’s decisions” idea.
• But the mechanism is about marriage/paternity selection, not fewer children overall. These are observational, state-level studies (not experiments), the effects concentrate among lower-income groups, and the “men’s decisions” channel is inferred indirectly. Some related work is mixed.
• The overall fertility decline is not attributed to support policy. It is broad-based across education and income and is explained by marriage decline, rising education, and economic/normative shifts. [3, 4]

Separately — and well documented — orders set above a lower-income payer’s real ability to pay are a genuine barrier to compliance and drive arrears. That is a real hardship even though it is a different question from whether support policy is driving national fertility.

6. Fond du Lac, locally

Fond du Lac County grew only modestly — about +0.5% since 2020 (to ~104,669 in 2025) — while the city slipped about −0.4% (to ~44,541). [5] The pressure is real enough that the city launched a program offering $9,000 in incentives to relocate workers there, a direct sign of a shrinking working-age base. [6] Local stagnation like this is the backdrop against which family-formation and support questions are felt — though, as above, the data can’t assign that stagnation to any single cause.