If allowances are combined with other supports for raising children, such as health insurance and child care, this should improve the welfare of all children whether they experience divorce or not. These policy recommendations and many of the debates about how divorce settlements should be arranged affect parents and nonparents differently. As the editors note, a clean break is not appropriate for parents who have continuing obligations to their children. Thus, the distinction between parents and nonparents is important for evaluations of divorce policy. Another distinction, that between children born in and outside of marriage, would have been useful in the discussion of private and public responsibility for children.
Some authors do discuss nonmarital children.
Yet neither these authors nor others consider the implications of nonmarital childbearing for assessing the costs of private child support and for trade offs between private and public responsibility for children. This is surprising given that so many of the authors in this volume address problems of divorce by considering the meaning of marriage. For a number of the countries described in the book, childbearing outside of marriage challenges the definition of marriage as a license for parenthood. Divorcing parents devote tremendous energy and experience terrible pain in resolving problems of custody and the nonresident parent's continued access to children. Although the emphasis in this book is on the economic costs of divorce for women and children, it is impossible to separate these economic matters from matters of social responsibility for children.