'Bad parents' who abandon their children: The fight to collect child support in South Korea

"I always believed that as a parent, putting my children's lives before my own was only natural — but if I had truly been alone in all of this, I don't think I could have held on."

Kim Ho-jung, a man in his 40s using a pseudonym, has raised his two children largely on his own for more than a decade. He became a de facto sole caregiver when his younger child was just four years old. Kim had his first child at 21, and whenever a child fell ill or the school called, he had to drop everything and go. He eventually left salaried employment to run his own business so he could manage childcare, and when the COVID-19 pandemic gutted his income, he took on two and then three jobs to keep his family afloat.

Kim said that when his business was struggling, he asked his ex-wife to contribute just 400,000 won ($290) a month toward their daughter's hagwon fees while she was in her final year of high school — but was ignored. When their daughter entered university and dormitory costs added to the burden, he asked again and received no response. "Even if the amount isn't large, I thought that if the advance payment system paid me first, my ex-wife would find it harder to keep ignoring her obligation," he said, explaining why he turned to the Child Support Enforcement Agency.

A divorce ends a marriage, but it does not end a parent's responsibilities. In reality, however, many non-custodial parents delay or simply refuse to pay child support, citing financial hardship or unresolved conflict with their former partner.

According to the Ministry of Statistics, there were about 1.48 million single-parent households in South Korea last year.

A 2024 survey on single-parent families found that more than seven in 10 unmarried or divorced single parents — 71.3 percent — were not receiving child support. The average monthly child-support expenditure per child, excluding shared household costs such as rent and food, was 582,500 won. Broken down by age, parents spent an average of 461,000 won a month on preschool-age children, 505,000 won on elementary school students, and 661,000 won on middle and high school students — a burden that grows as children get older.

On Wednesday afternoon, 119 staff members were at work on the 24th floor of Namsan Square in Jung-gu, Seoul — home of the Child Support Enforcement Agency — helping custodial parents navigate the legal process of recovering unpaid support.

The agency assists custodial parents with everything from filing lawsuits to claim or increase child support and securing enforceable debt claims, to garnishing wages, pursuing debt collection and forcing asset auctions. From January through July this year, the agency supported more than 6,800 lawsuits alone.

Lee Tae-young, a litigation support attorney at the agency, said the parents who come through its doors have often already endured severe emotional stress from the divorce or separation itself. "They arrive in a state of compounded mental and financial hardship, because even after a court has ordered child support to be paid, the other party simply refuses to comply," he said.

Lee said some of the worst offenders are professionals and business owners with social standing and ample assets. "The cases I find most heartbreaking are those where someone clearly has the means to pay but simply chooses not to," he said.

Recovering child support through legal channels takes considerable time. A first-instance ruling in a child support case typically takes six months to a year. Even seeking an increase to an existing support order is not straightforward — a child's growth or rising prices alone are not sufficient grounds. Custodial parents must document concrete changes in income or childcare costs, such as a job loss or a child's disability diagnosis.

Even after a court rules in a parent's favor, payment does not follow automatically. That is why the agency supports custodial parents through the entire post-ruling process — including wage garnishment, debt collection and forced asset auctions.

Lee cited the case he remembers most vividly: a mother who went seven years without receiving a single child support payment, only to recover the full amount in arrears with the agency's help.

"She was raising two children on her own and had gone seven years without support. When both children entered high school and the financial pressure became unbearable, she came to us," Lee said. "We tracked down the debtor's address and workplace, filed an enforcement claim, pursued wage garnishment and a collection order, and registered the debtor on the delinquent obligors list. In the end, the debtor paid the full 61.2 million won in arrears."

The government has steadily tightened sanctions against parents who refuse to pay child support, yet roughly half of custodial parents still go without.

In 2021, the government introduced driver's license suspensions, overseas travel bans and public disclosure of delinquent parents' names. In September 2024, it lowered the threshold for imposing sanctions, allowing courts to act on an enforcement order alone without first issuing a civil detention order. Last July, the waiting period before a name is publicly disclosed was cut from at least three months to at least 10 days.

As a result, sanction decisions by the Child Support Enforcement Review Committee rose from 947 in 2024 to 1,389 last year, and 720 sanctions were approved in the first half of this year alone.

Despite the tougher measures, the child support compliance rate stood at just 49.9 percent as of June — still barely half.

While custodial parents endure the drawn-out legal process of recovering unpaid support, a separate program is designed to plug the immediate financial gap: the child support advance payment system. Introduced last July, the program has the government pay 200,000 won per minor child per month when the non-custodial parent defaults, then seek reimbursement from the debtor.

Currently, only households whose recognized income falls at or below 150 percent of the median income threshold are eligible, but that income cap will be abolished starting Oct. 29.

Through May, the government had paid a total of 16.73 billion won in advances to 10,917 minor children across 6,923 households.

Kim is currently receiving advance payments for his minor child. He said, however, that 200,000 won a month is not enough to meaningfully ease the burden.

"Getting 200,000 won a month doesn't give you breathing room in life," he said. "But when you're not receiving a single won from the other parent, having the agency step in with even a little support — it does let you breathe."

He added that he hoped the support amount would be adjusted to reflect children's ages and that the system would be made easier to access.

Against this backdrop, the government is moving to strengthen criminal penalties for parents who willfully refuse to pay child support despite being legally obligated to do so.

The proposed reforms would raise the maximum criminal penalty for non-payment from one year in prison or a fine of up to 10 million won to three years in prison or a fine of up to 30 million won. The grace period between a civil detention order and criminal prosecution would also be halved, from one year to six months.

Lee said child support cases are fundamentally different from ordinary civil disputes between adults over financial claims. "Child support is not simply a matter of personal conflict or private interest between parents," he said. "It is a survival right directly tied to a minor child's life — an area where the state and society have an essential duty to intervene to ensure a child's full and healthy development."