Child support and pink slips

The same story echoed a dozen times through Room E8 of Manhattan Family Court in a single day: fathers, pinched by the recession, pleading for a reduction in child support.

A salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue who is estranged from his teenage daughter said he feared he would be included in the next round of layoffs expected at his store.

A man who had been laid off from a factory said he managed to find work at Mets games, but for less pay, $9 an hour. Another man, on the verge of eviction, begged for a break from his $315 monthly payments.

“Last week was my child’s birthday, and I couldn’t get him a present,” he said, burying his head in his hands. “This is killing me.”

Since January, Family Court in New York has been filled with urgent requests like these, alarming judges and overwhelming calendars with what are known as modification cases.

Similar patterns are unfolding across the country: In Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, the district attorney’s family support division has received an unusually high number of calls from parents who previously paid diligently but are now having trouble.

The child-support office in Milwaukee saw a 20 percent spike in the number of custodial parents seeking enforcement of support orders last year, with most of the increase coming in the fall as the unemployment rate there began to creep upward.

To explain why they can no longer pay as much per month, the parents, typically fathers, cite layoffs, cutbacks in work hours and the loss of homes to foreclosure. Presented with documentation of falling incomes and rising expenses, judges often have little choice but to grant the downward adjustments, even in the face of protests from mothers struggling to support children.

Magistrate Matthew Troy, a stocky, gregarious man with a white horseshoe mustache who is one of 15 judges hearing such cases in Manhattan Family Court, said the decisions can be brutal. “It’s not a trickle down — it’s a direct route,” he said of the effects, especially in poor families. “Everybody who relies on the father gets hit.” more