Women's child support labour: provisioning and the gendered work of negotiating child support transfers

The Australian Child Support Scheme is marked by high levels of debt and unreliable, partial and non-payment, which exacerbate mothers’ financial insecurity. These issues are primarily explored through a focus on fathers’ willingness and ability to pay child support, with little acknowledgement of mothers’ efforts and agency in managing its transfer. In this paper we synthesize data from three in-depth interview studies with women who were due to receive child support to describe mothers’ negotiation of the receipt and use of child support. We argue that women’s efforts are a form of labour. There are four dimensions of child support labour: emotion work, information work, interaction work and budget work. We conclude that this labour produces outcomes that can benefit them and their children but through inter-personal and structural disparities in socio-economic power, men also benefit from this work.