Gov. Wes Moore and Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller have proclaimed August 2026 National Child Support Awareness Month in Maryland, a formal declaration the Department of Human Services announced this week alongside a citation from Acting Secretary Stacy L. Rodgers thanking the state’s child support staff for their work. It is the kind of proclamation Annapolis issues every year, for a program that, on paper, deserves the applause. Nobody at MDBayNews is arguing that children shouldn’t be financially supported by both parents.
But read the proclamation next to what Maryland’s family courts actually do, and the celebration looks lopsided. The state has spent years building an increasingly automatic, increasingly aggressive machine to collect child support. It has built nothing comparable to make sure a paying parent’s court-ordered time with that same child actually happens.
What the state actually enforces
Maryland’s child support enforcement system runs on a tiered schedule that requires almost no discretion once a parent falls behind, according to the Maryland Judiciary’s own enforcement rules:
30 days past due: mandatory wage withholding kicks in automatically.
60 days past due: the arrears get reported to credit bureaus.
120 days past due: the state can now suspend a driver’s license, a threshold Maryland lawmakers doubled from 60 days in a reform that took effect Oct. 1, 2025, after finding that faster suspensions were sometimes costing noncustodial parents their jobs, which made it harder, not easier, for them to pay. Professional license suspension has separately operated on a 120-day threshold all along and wasn’t part of the change.
Contempt of court, with the possibility of jail time, sits behind all of that as a last resort.
Now look at what happens when a custodial parent simply refuses to hand over the child for court-ordered visitation. Maryland Family Law § 9-105 gives a judge the option to reschedule the missed time, modify the custody order, or award fees “in a manner consistent with the best interests of the child.” That’s it. No agency monitors it. No 30-, 60-, or 120-day trigger exists. The denied parent has to personally file a motion, personally prove the denial was willful, and personally pay for a lawyer to do it, with no guarantee of any real remedy at the end.
One side of a custody order comes with automatic wage garnishment, credit reporting, and license suspension. The other side comes with a single sentence of statute and a permission slip for a judge to maybe do something about it.
“One side of a custody order comes with automatic wage garnishment, credit reporting and license suspension. The other side comes with a permission slip for a judge to maybe do something about it.”
The asymmetry isn’t unique to Maryland, but Maryland hasn’t fixed it either
This gap isn’t a Maryland invention. It traces back to federal law: Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, passed in 1975 and rebuilt in the 1996 welfare reform law, requires every state to run a conforming child support enforcement program as a condition of receiving federal funds. States that want their share of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families money have to build automatic wage withholding, uniform enforcement formats, and interstate collection databases. Layered on top of that, the Bradley Amendment permanently bars any court from forgiving child support arrears after the fact.
There is no equivalent federal law for visitation. No funding is conditioned on states building automatic enforcement for denied parenting time. No federal agency tracks custodial interference the way the Office of Child Support Enforcement tracks arrears nationwide.
“There is no equivalent federal law for visitation.”
Other states have shown Maryland it doesn’t have to stay this lopsided. Minnesota requires courts to award compensatory time, cost reimbursement, and attorney’s fees for repeated, intentional denial of parenting time, the same mandatory language that governs its support enforcement. Missouri goes further still: state law directs courts to “enforce visitation, custody and child support orders in the same manner,” and lets a judge reduce a support obligation when a parent has, without good cause, blocked the other parent’s court-ordered access.
Maryland has had years to look at those examples. It hasn’t adopted either approach.
A citation for one side of the ledger
“Maryland’s enforcement priorities run in one direction only.”
None of this means the Child Support Administration’s staff don’t do real, difficult work, or that the proclamation itself is dishonest. Chasing down unpaid support is a legitimate government function, and CSA caseworkers process an enormous volume of cases across Maryland’s 24 local jurisdictions.
What’s missing is any acknowledgment, in the same proclamation or anywhere near it, that Maryland’s enforcement priorities run in one direction only. The state government is comfortable issuing formal citations for staff who collect money. It has not shown the same enthusiasm for the parents, and the children, on the other side of a visitation order nobody is required to enforce.
“The state is comfortable issuing formal citations for staff who collect money. It has not shown the same enthusiasm for court-ordered parenting time.”
What to watch:
Whether any Maryland legislator introduces a Minnesota- or Missouri-style visitation enforcement bill in the 2027 session.
Whether the Child Support Administration’s public materials this month mention parenting-time enforcement at all.
How the October 2025 license-suspension reform affects Maryland’s arrears collection totals once a full year of data is available.
Sources: Maryland Department of Human Services Facebook post, Aug. 28, 2026, including images of the governor’s proclamation and Acting Secretary Stacy L. Rodgers’ citation to the Child Support Administration (flagged here as agency-published social media, corroborated by the primary documents pictured in the post); Maryland Judiciary child support enforcement schedule; Md. Code, Family Law § 9-105; Md. Code, Family Law § 10-119 and Transportation § 16-203, as amended effective Oct. 1, 2025; 42 U.S.C. §§ 651–669b (Title IV-D); 42 U.S.C. § 666(a)(9) (Bradley Amendment); Minn. Stat. § 518.175, subd. 6; Mo. Rev. Stat. § 452.340. Reporting and analysis by Michael Phillips, MDBayNews, Aug. 30, 2026.
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