What Happens When Your Ex Won’t Pay Child Support: How to Talk About It With Your Kids
Last Tuesday, I was folding soccer practice laundry at the kitchen table while my 11-year-old Lila crunched through math homework across from me. She pushed her notebook aside and pointed to a screenshot on her phone: the $120 cleats with molded ankle protection her coach said all players need for travel season. Her old pair has a hole in the toe she’s been covering with athletic tape for a month. I’d been avoiding this conversation for two weeks.
Lila’s dad left two years ago, two weeks after I found out he’d been seeing a coworker for eight months. He moved in with her, they had a baby last spring, and six months ago he stopped sending child support. He texted me once to say his new bills are too high, and Lila is “old enough to understand” he can’t afford it right now. I work full-time teaching 3rd grade, so we don’t go hungry, but the extra stuff – cleats, field trip fees, the new winter coat she outgrew – gets pushed to the bottom of the list. The dishwasher has been leaking for three weeks and I’m still putting a bucket under it.
The first time Lila asked why the money stopped coming, I was still raw from the breakup. I let everything spill out: I told her he was a liar, he cheated, he chose his new family over her, he didn’t care what we needed. She didn’t say anything, just got up and went to her room, and I found her curled up on her bed an hour later scrolling through old photos of the two of them at the zoo. That’s when I realized I’d messed up. I spend all day working with kids going through custody and support issues, but when it’s my own, I lost all sense of what to do.
I called Lila’s school counselor the next day, and we met for 20 minutes after school. She gave me three specific rules to follow, no vague “be supportive” nonsense, which I appreciated. First, don’t dump the adult drama on Lila. She doesn’t need to hear the details of the cheating or how angry I am. Second, always make it clear that the choice to not pay is his, not hers. Third, be honest about money but don’t burden her with all the stress.
Back to that Tuesday night. I wiped a spot of detergent off my jeans and sat down next to her, instead of avoiding the question like I usually do. I said, “Right now, your dad isn’t keeping his promise to help pay for the things you need. That’s his mistake, not yours, and it has nothing to do with how much he’s supposed to care about you. We don’t have an extra $120 right now this month, but I found a barely used pair of the same cleats on the team parent swap page for $30. Would you want to try those first while we save up for the new ones?”
She picked at a loose thread on her hoodie for a minute, then asked, “Is it because I was rude to him that time I didn’t want to leave to go to his house last Christmas? Did I make him mad?” That hit me right in the chest, just like the counselor said it would. Kids this age automatically connect any big adult change to something they did wrong. They’re still building their sense of self, so if their parent doesn’t want to pay to take care of them, the first place they look is the mirror.
I held her hand and said, “That had nothing to do with this. Your dad made choices a long time before that that changed how things work for us. None of it is your fault. I’ve got you, we’re okay, even if we have to wait for extra things.” She nodded, then leaned her head on my shoulder for a minute, then went back to her math homework. That’s it. No big crying scene, no big dramatic resolution, just a weight lifted that I didn’t even know was there.
I’ve talked to a lot of parents in the same spot in the teacher’s lounge, and a lot of them think they have two choices: badmouth the ex to their kid, or pretend everything is fine and lie about why money is tight. Neither works. Lying makes kids imagine worse things than the truth, and badmouthing makes them feel like they have to pick sides, and that any bad thing the ex did is part of them too. If you say their dad is a selfish person who let us down, they think “half of me is dad, so half of me is a disappointment too.” It’s that simple, that hard.
The concrete rules I follow now are pretty easy to stick to. If I need to yell or cry about how unfair this is, I do it when Lila is at practice or asleep, talking to my best friend on the phone. I never bring up the cheating or his new family to Lila unless she asks first, and even then I keep it short and neutral. If she asks about money, I answer in age-appropriate terms: I don’t say “we’re going to lose the house” if that’s not true, I say “we have enough for rent and groceries and what we need, we just have to wait for the extra stuff.” I always end with that line: this is the other person’s choice, not your fault, I’ve got us.
I filed for enforcement through the state child support office three months ago. The court date isn’t until January, and I’ve heard it can take months more to get anything, even then. He still posts photos of their trips to the lake and new ATV on Instagram, and it still makes my jaw clench when I see it. Lila wore the used cleats to her last game, and she scored the winning goal. Afterward, she ran over to me and held up her foot to show me they fit perfectly.
It’s not the life I thought we’d have. There are still bills I have to put off, and nights I lie awake worrying what will happen if my car breaks down. But so far, these small changes in how I talk to Lila have worked. It doesn’t fix the problem of the missing money, but it keeps the problem from hurting her more than it has to. We’ll see what happens next.
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