This chapter, and indeed this book, takes as its starting point the assumption that child support policies – and administrative systems that attend to and enact court-based decision-making – were introduced as means to address social problems that were not well-managed by previously existing arrangements. Typically, early child support systems were exclusively courtbased or individualistic in nature, whereby social norms and conventions, rather than an external decision-making body, determined what was to be provided to children following parental separation (Wyss, 2001). While many such systems still exist, over time ‘improvements’ (Li, 2007) were deemed necessary in some states whereby existing systems – or their lack thereof – were found to be inadequate for managing the social problems experienced by children in single-mother-headed families and by the states that governed them.

As this chapter sets out, ‘improvements’ to the management of support for separated families hold with them assumptions about the nature of the problem to be solved, the best solution to address the problem, and the nature of the population affected. These are the symbolic assumptions that this book seeks to tease out, for the purpose of identifying what the problems, solutions and population assumptions say about the roles of mothers, fathers, institutions and the state post-separation; and to assess whether these assumptions still hold in the face of changing work, gender, family and internationalising norms that have and are changing the nature of post-separation families and the societies in which they exist. However, I do not take the position that the development of child support policy and administrative techniques – or lack thereof – has occurred as a strictly rational response to an evident problem, as would be pursued by mainstream policy analysts. Rather, I take an interpretivist approach (Yanow, 2000) wherein I see child support law, administration and policy development as political choices to manage problems that have come to the fore within a constellation of social and political influences. Here, I do not use ‘political’ to illustrate the formal, parliamentary system, but rather I use the term in the Foucauldian sense, to represent the contestation and enactment of power in diffuse and opaque ways (Foucault, 1980).