Walter Backstrom is spot on (“With divorce, children have the most to lose,” April 18).

I would like to suggest one additional change that might further serve to preserve marriages, or at least encourage couples to expend every difficult effort to resolve their problems: Revise the state child support table so that it is based on each family’s actual cost of raising a child or children.

Nothing will more quickly discourage a father (or mother) away from bolting a marriage than to be faced with ponying up a proportional share of the actual costs of raising a child. The current child support obligation was established about 20 years ago and has never been adjusted for inflation or the cost of housing. This means that the custodial parent, more often than not, is faced with covering far more than an income proportional share of expenses for each child — even when the non-custodial parent voluntarily pays state-mandated support.

In my case, my ex-husband’s child support obligation has never even provided half the cost of housing for our children, let alone any of their other expenses (like food and clothing). In our household, this means that even though my salary and my ex-husband’s salary is about equal, I finance about 80 percent rather than 50 percent of my children’s living costs. Perhaps if my children’s father had been forced by the state to pay his fair share of the actual costs of raising his children, he might have had a second thought about walking out the front door.

Ginny Vanderlinde, Federal Way