Track 3-Child Support and Finances
Fathers in Focus Conference 2025 » Track 3-Child Support and Finances
Child Support and Finances
In this track, we offer sessions that provide guidance on navigating child support agreements, budgeting tips for single parents, and strategies for managing financial responsibilities. Managing child support and finances can be challenging. Whether you’re seeking advice on negotiating child support or looking for ways to improve your financial literacy, these sessions will provide valuable insights to help you make informed decisions.
Breakout Speakers
Pathways to Economic Stability: Family Income, Child Support, and Development
Investigate the connection between income stability in early childhood and child support systems with their effects on school preparedness and lifelong achievement. Quentin provides practical strategies for fathers to enhance economic and developmental growth while highlighting how financial stability during early childhood leads to a brighter future.
Quentin Riser’s research examines how birth, child, and family characteristics, as well as public policies, influence children’s cognitive and social-emotional development and overall family well-being. He is also interested in the application of quantitative research methods and study design within the fields of developmental and family sciences, drawing on secondary, administrative, and other data sources in his work.
His work aims to inform the development and implementation of evidence-based policies and interventions at the local, national, and international levels.
Child Support 101: Understanding the Process and Your Rights
Understand paternity basics and how to establish court cases along with enforcement guidelines before closing cases. The agency’s representative, Miguel McDonald, provides transparent guidance which enables fathers to confidently manage and understand their child support duties. This session offers clear directions and support for individuals with existing or prospective cases who need more understanding.
Miguel Tovar McDonald has been in public service for over 20 years, and has worked at the Dane County Child Support Agency since 2018. He is the father of two. His areas of specialty are, entering new court orders, enforcing existing orders, fiscal case management, interstate cases, and is bilingual in Spanish.
When Asking for Help Creates a “Whole ‘Nother Layer of Bondage”: Unmasking the impacts of child support cooperation requirements on families
When unmarried parents ask the state for assistance in caring for themselves and their children, they may be required to cooperate with the child support agency. While that process sometimes brings resources to the family, it can also have long-term negative impacts as it can ensnare the family in the child support, criminal-legal, and public assistance systems for decades. Cooperation requirements disproportionately impact unmarried, low-income, Black and Brown families. Participants will engage with researchers and educators to uncover the ways in which policies structure and limit parental choices and create “a whole ‘nother layer of bondage” for parents with low-incomes trying to care for their families. This session will be a learning space for fathers, mothers, community service providers, government workers and researchers.
David J. Pate, Jr. is an Associate Professor in the School of Human Ecology, UW -Madison. He was previously at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Helen Bader School of Social Welfare, Department of Social Work where he served as the Chair Emeritus and Associate Professor. Prior to entering the world of academia, he was a practicing social worker for sixteen years in the areas of direct practice, administration, and policy advocacy.
Professor Pate’s research projects involve examining the life course events of low-income Black males. He is a nationally known expert on non-custodial fathers.
Susan M. Stanton, Ph.D., is a parent, researcher, and educator. Attending the Milwaukee Public Schools as desegregation was enacted, many seeds were planted about policy and practice. Experiences as a high school social studies teacher, coach, academic advisor, community worker, single parent and caregiver to her elderly parents helped sow those seeds into questions and frustrations around the pursuits of justice and equity. Working as a policy analyst, attending graduate school and reading have helped her to more clearly understand the profound impacts of structural inequity in the lives of communities and families–fathers, mothers, and children. Consequently, much of her research has focused on the ways that men, women, and young people experience and navigate the systems of child support, public assistance, incarceration, and schooling. Her analyses work to amplify life at the intersections of oppressed identities. She currently works in a post doctoral position at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where she also earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
