My son was born when I was 18 years old to a girl a barely knew. Ive never established paternity, although I have had some doubts as to if he is my son, but regardless I went into the navy shortly after finding out my sons mother was pregnant to be able to support him.
I was ordered to pay 240.00 a month, which I have paid for 12 years now. I was able to see my son a couple of times when he was younger, but it was difficult because of the navy. My ex-girlfriend remarried shortly after my son was born, and my son has believed this was his father all these years. When I got out of the navy 4 years ago, I took a job that would put me closer to my son so that I could set up visitation with him, but when I talked with his mother she informed me that he had Asperger's and the Dr's advised that it was a bad idea to confuse him.
Thinking I was doing the best thing for him, I agreed to stay away. This past year I received papers for a modification for child support, I sent in my information, wsnt concerned about fighting it feeling an increase to 500.00 a month seemed fair ( I was thinking that is what it might be).
They came back and increased it to 972.00 mo. Between all this I got back into contact with my sons mother, because I wanted to see if it was possible to be able to see him. I had not seen him in 10 years. I wanted to contact a child psychologist to find out what the repercussions of this would be for my son, but before I was able to, my sons mother told him about me. I found out that my son was never diagnosed with Asperger's.
I want to find out what I can do, to set up visitation with my son, and also get child support reduced. My sons mother has not worked for over a year, in fact she quit a 10 year job she had with Oregon state to move to California, and then shortly move back to Oregon, both times mid school year. There is a lot more to this, she also received a 90k inheritance in 2009 that she blew away within 4 months.
I have just gotten married, and my wife has 4 children. Because of this support order I lost my house. Any advice would be appreciated.
This study combines administrative monthly earnings data, birth records, and survey data on hours worked and earnings to describe the labour market outcomes of men and women as they have children, and how parenthood contributes to the gender pay gap in New Zealand. Women on average experience a 4.4% decrease in hourly wages upon becoming mother while men experience no significant decrease. Parenthood thus increases the gender gap in hourly wages.
This paper is an initial exploration of what we can learn regarding the drivers of the gender pay gap in New Zealand (NZ) from combining administrative wage data, birth records, and survey data on hours worked and earnings. Our particular focus is the role of parenthood penalties in this pay gap.
The gender pay gap in NZ has generally been decreasing since 1998 (Ministry for Women, 2017), and in the 2017 June quarter fell to 9.7%, its lowest since 2012 (Statistics NZ, 2017b). However, the gap is still a long way from zero, and a high proportion of it cannot be explained by differences in observable characteristics (Pacheco, Li, and Cochrane, 2017). Furthermore, recent research by Sin, Stillman, and Fabling (2017) suggests the gap cannot be explained by differences in productivity between males and females.
In NZ, as internationally, the gender pay gap is larger among parents than non-parents, though the mechanisms driving this relationship are not entirely clear.2 In NZ, Dixon (2000) finds a 7% hourly wage penalty of having one child, which rises to 10% for two or more children. As Wilner (2016) discusses, four main hypotheses have been proposed for the “motherhood penalty”: human capital depreciation while mothers are on parental leave; unobservable differences between parents and non-parents; mothers choosing to work in lower-paying, familyfriendly
In relation to the first hypothesis, the length of time a mother takes out of employment is affected by a range of factors including the opportunity cost of time out of work that she faces, her access to and cost of childcare, her parental leave entitlements, and her willingness to return to the workforce. These factors will be influenced by legislation; we now provide context on the relevant institutional settings in NZ.
In 2002, government funded paid parental leave was introduced, which allowed mothers who met certain employment requirements to take up to twelve weeks of paid parental leave. For the duration of leave, mothers would receive government transfers equal to their prior weekly wage, up to a maximum amount, which was pegged at the NZ average wage (NZ Parliament, 2002). Since then, the duration of paid leave has increased incrementally and now stands at 18 weeks. There are also forthcoming changes in this space as the new government has recently announcement plans to increase this to 22 weeks by July 2018 and 26 weeks by July 2020
The other relevant area of legislation is provision of early childcare education (ECE). In July 2007, the government introduced 20 hours per week of free ECE for all three and four year olds in communitybased and teacher-led services.
With these NZ context specific settings in mind, we begin our analysis with a population-level view.
We use administrative wage data to describe the distribution of how long women are out of paid employment after having their first child and how this differs with pre-parenthood income. We then look at employment rates and wage earnings among employed women each month in the five years before and ten years after birth of their first child.
We also compare women who spend different lengths of time out of employment both overall and within each pre-parenthood earnings quartile. Although this does not strictly isolate the causal effect of length of time out of employment on subsequent monthly earnings, it does show how, within earnings quartiles, women who return quickly to work increase their earnings lead over those who return more slowly.