Children need to be financially supported by their parents. Enforcing child support is a crucial component in the effort to maintain and raise the economic and social welfare of children in the United States. The number of children residing with only one biological parent has increased significantly in the past ten years. Persistently high divorce rates and high levels of nonmarital births suggest that the proportion of children living in a household without both parents will only increase. Of course, meeting a child’s financial needs can be a daunting task for a single parent or a combined family. More families will need help and, as welfare reform has made public assistance less available, more families will come to rely on child support payments. Making sure that noncustodial parents contribute financially to the upbringing of their children will not only further the maintenance of parental bonds but will help ensure that children in poor families are kept out of poverty.

In order to anticipate the needs of families, it is necessary to calculate the future growth of the child support population—the number of children, the number of custodians, and the number of noncustodial parents. In this report, we develop projections of the child support population in 2004 and in 2009. These projections build on the estimates developed for 1988 and 1998 in the baseline report, “Getting to Know Child Support’s Future Customers: Baseline Estimates for 1988 and 1998.” Thus, altogether, we have estimates and projections that span more than twenty years, a period of remarkable change in the child support population of the United States.

Of course, projecting future populations entails some uncertainty. Human behavior is not always easy to understand in the present, let alone in the future. In general, demographers rely on historical trends to forecast future populations. For example, the United States Census Bureau uses patterns and trends in fertility, mortality, and migration to forecast future populations. The past is a better predictor of the short-range future than it is of the long-range future, and thus projections for shorter time horizons (five or ten years) are likely to be more accurate than projections for longer time horizons. Similarly, projections for large areas with large populations tend to be more robust than projections for small areas with small populations. For example, because national population projections do not require projections of internal migration, projections for the entire United States are more robust than projections for individual states or regions.

The projections we have developed for the child support population are short-term projections relying on large data sets and established trends covering broad regions. Unless there are dramatic and unexpected changes in the social and economic climate, we expect our projections to be robust.