A University of California professor shows that child support guidelines are 200%-400% higher than the real cost of raising children.

The study is based on thousands of households and it compares expenditures of families with 1, 2 and 3 children with those with no children, the control group. It also studies single parent households. It compares the marginal cost of raising a child (the real out of pocket cost) to the methods used in most states: average expenditures (divide all expenditures by number in the household) and the income-expenditures (IE) shares method. Both the existing methods are deeply flawed because they make hypothetical allocations of income to raising children. Real families adjust their total expenditures because the children change their lifestyle, but this is ignored by child support guidelines.

All this is clearly explained by Joe Sorge at DivorceCorp:

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