I'm partial to the Conservative slogan "personal responsibility". However, I wish it actually had some meat behind it not just an empty slogan. I wish it were applied to everyone. If it's not, it's meaningless.
Our current methods of enforcing personal responsibility are not very successful. I think that's what Sauron is getting at.
In my own situation of "child support" it has worked out well. I subsidized my ex to stay home with our child (mostly) at $1000 per month, and it's been a good investment. Since the age of 6, we have simply shared expenses, other than health insurance, which I pay.
It's been good for everybody. My ex isn't resentful and neither am I, and our daughter ends up getting way more spent on her, directly for her benefit, than if the goobermint imposed a percentage of income payment on me (or her). We each subsidize activities we initiate (ice skating lessons, equipment, dresses etc., about $300 a month for me) and jointly cover others (private school at $10K a year, clothing, etc.).
It works well enough that we're able to live next door to each other, providing my daughter easy access to either parent, and zero time wasted travelling between households.
I'd suggest it as what parents should try to do for their kids.
But how do we handle those (of either sex) who don't give a damn and are irresponsible?
Well yours is a model. May I suggest that we promote your model as the ideal arrangement. Celebrate it and publicize it. Make a big fuss about it an popularize it.
Right now what we "support" through our attitudes (such as Sauron's) is that males are NOT expected to act as you have toward their child. Why should they, it was not the man's fault the child was born (under the conceptualization of responsibility noted in these articles which OMIT mentioning men at all). The very premise of these articles on welfare "reform" is that children are the sole responsibility of their mothers. Period. End of discussion. (Anyone who mentions fathers will presumably be shot).
That is 180 degrees different than the model your situation projects. Your situation presumes as a baseline premise that the father is not only providing monetary support, he is actually physically THERE ... present and accounted for and involved in the child's life. He's not invisible, he's not surgically cut out of the family picture.
Your situation is so radically different than the premise supported in these articles on welfare "reform" where fathers are not even mentioned, not even hinted at. In fact one could interpolate from reading these articles that children on welfare arrived by parthenogenesis so thoroughly is the father excised from discussion on the cycle of poverty/crime etc.
And then you go on to read other articles about how damaging it is for children to grow up in "single parent" homes. These articles also go out of their way to either never, or hardly ever, mention men/fathers.
What I think many Conservatives don't realize when we pass around the manless fatherless articles that claim success in welfare "reform" is that they are unwittingly suppporting a liberal/socialist agenda of abortion and increased taxes for social spending down the line. It's really just sweeping issues under the rug to be dealt with at a later date. And as Sauron has suggested, many would then likely deal with them in ends-justify-the-means fashion once they reach critical mass.
Threatening to pull the rug out on social services and calling it "reform" is not enough if you are still (unwittingly) supporting the basic premises behind it, ie that society can pick up the tab later on (crime, drugs, illiteracy, cycle continueing) for the defaulted responsibility of adults. Or that we can solve these problems down the line by extreme anti-Constitutional measure which undermine our entire system of government.