Studying judgments about child support awards provides an opportunity to extend justice theories, which have often focused on allocations of positive goods such as income. Because suggesting a child support award requires both deciding the amount of the cost to be divided between parents and making the division, an analysis of child support judgments must distinguish allocation rules and their operands. Approximately 1,000 respondents in a 1985 telephone survey in Wisconsin were each presented with three vignettes describing a family situation and were asked how much they thought the child support award should be in each situation. In the aggregate, awards can be described by a “proportional contribution-variable need” system in which parents' contributions are proportional to their resources.