The primary goal of child support programs is to improve children’s well-being by emphasizing the roles of both parents in providing for them. Some families receive child support from noncustodial parents regularly. For other families, payments may be sporadic, partial, or not received at all. Parents who do not make their child support payments can be subject to enforcement measures, including civil contempt actions requiring them to attend court hearings. Additionally, parents may face arrest if they fail to appear in court or fail to pay their share.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) model aimed to increase noncustodial parents’ compliance with child support orders by providing an alternative to the civil contempt process that followed principles of procedural justice, or the idea of fairness in processes. The PJAC demonstration project aimed to address noncustodial parents’ reasons for nonpayment of child support orders, promote their positive engagement with the child support program and custodial parents, and improve the consistency and completeness of their child support payments by testing a new approach to service delivery across six child support agencies.

This demonstration included a research study wherein noncustodial parents who were about to enter the contempt process were assigned at random to a group offered PJAC services or to a control group not eligible to receive PJAC services; instead, the control group proceeded with the standard contempt process. Parents assigned to the PJAC services group were given a trained PJAC case manager who worked with both parents. PJAC case managers offered a range of services to parents, focusing on building positive relationships following the principles of procedural justice. The PJAC demonstration enrolled participants from February 2018 through September 2020, and served participants through September 2021—a period that included the onset and first 1.5 years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented social service agencies and their customers with unforeseen challenges. At its onset, child support agencies faced office and court closures, and staff members had to make the transition to remote work and virtual service delivery. The PJAC demonstration offers an opportunity to examine how child support services, enforcement, and contempt changed at the onset of the pandemic, and to hear agency staff members’ and parents’ perspectives on those changes.