Hey Bobby, 18 and out is good. In fact move to a smaller house to eliminate bedrooms and no returns.

Paying for college is easy. Federal student loans, etc. are easy to get. Most are never repayed. A minority student will probably have everything waives or even be paid to attend—diversity in action at your expense.

I’m not sure I even like forced “cild support”. At least not the way the state goes about it:

Tell father he must pay so much a month; lock him in ail when he don’t.

The result is that the kid doesn’t get ‘supported’ anyhow.

1. His father is a deabeat bum, or, 2. His father is a deadbeat locked-up in a jail. So I’ve never seen what the gain is, with this law.

Does anyone actually benefit from the law? I doubt it.

Our local Limbaugh, Doc Thompson on Sieg Heil on the dial, WRVA, went over this in his afternoon rant-a-thon last week. Naturally, he tried to blame liberals but it was introduced by a Repug.
  Personally, I believe in the 18 and out rule. When you are 18, out the door.
  Not all parents can afford to send their off spring to college. It would be nice if they could.
  Actually, given the price of tuition, I am surprised anyone goes to college these days.

These bills are a serious erosion of parental rights.  And I say that as a happily-married, never-divorced parent who loves his child.

This sort of legislation has all sorts of bad results in states where it has been adopted.  Too bad more state judiciaries haven’t followed the lead of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which struck down a similar law.

I used to work at a non-profit law firm, and on a number of occasions, I was contacted by a parent forced to pay the college living expenses or tuition of an ungrateful, disrespectful adult “child”—or forced to pay their ex-spouse child support merely because their adult “child” was attending college (without any requirement that the child support paid for that adult “child” actually be spent on that child!)

At another blog, a legal commentator, Overlawyered’s Walter Olson, notes, “A reader writes: ‘We have this in Connecticut. It is a disaster. On paper, the CT court is to consider all factors as to whether it is reasonable to order a parent to pay child support. In reality, it is ordered whether or not the parent can afford to pay, whether or not the adult ‘child’ even speaks to the parent. So you have children who are basically giving their parent no respect or any sort of relationship who are given a free college ride. It is also used as a tool by vindictive parents against the other parent.’”

Public opposition to the bill has been intense at widely-read blogs like Overlawyered and Amy Alkon (where 60 commenters wrote in response).

One commenter at Richmond Sunlight notes that the few members of the public “who support this bill seem to do so as a punitive measure towards non-custodial parents (for the most part, fathers), under the false assumption that they abandoned their families. But as any divorce lawyer could tell you, two-thirds of all divorces are sought by wives over the husband’s objection, so the husbands/fathers haven’t abandoned their families. . . .(Most divorces are ‘no-fault.’ That is, no adultery, and no domestic violence, was shown).”

And data collected by a federal agency does indeed show that most divorces are initiated by wives, not husbands.  (The federal agency is the National Center for Health Statistics).  Similar studies from across the political spectrum are cited in Sanford Braver’s 1998 book, Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths.