Do Nonresident Fathers Have More Contact and Better Relationships with Their Most Recent Nonresident Child?

Background/Purpose:  Parental relationships in the US are often unstable, involving relationship dissolution, re-partnering, and, increasingly, new-partner fertility. As a result, many US children will live part of their childhood away from one parent, typically their father, and many fathers (and mothers) will have had children with more than one partner.  Empirical research has generally found that nonresident father involvement is associated with positive outcomes for children, but this involvement may be increasingly difficult for fathers with multiple families or with limited economic resources.  If fathers do not have the resources to remain involved with and provide support to nonresident children in multiple families, they may feel they have to prioritize some children over others. Some observers have suggested that some fathers “trade” families, focusing on the children from their most recent relationship. However, we know very little about the extent to which fathers’ contact and relationships with children in multiple families varies, and how this variation might be related to various characteristics. With a unique sample of fathers who are behind in their child support payments, we examine 2 questions: (a) How many of these fathers have multiple family responsibilities?  (b) Do fathers with multiple responsibilities have less contact, and report worse relationships with older children?

Methods: We use new data from the Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration program, a federally-funded eight-state intervention for noncustodial parents (NCPs) who are behind in their child support and have employment difficulties.  We use data from baseline surveys of over 9,000 NCPs who enrolled in the demonstration in 2013-15, the largest sample available of an understudied group that is quite important for social policy. We use descriptive analysis and multivariate OLS and logistic regressions (in which standard errors are clustered on the NCP).

Results by question: (a) Only about one-third of these NCPs had nonresident children with only one custodial parent; more complex family responsibilities are common, as about one-sixth have had children with three or more ex-partners and have both nonresident children and resident children. (b) By focusing on NCPs who have nonresident children in two or more families, we find that they have more contact and report a better relationship quality with the youngest child, though differences in relationship quality are modest, relative to differences in contact. In addition, we examine the level of any contact, in person contact, overnights and relationship quality, and how these relate to reports of formal and informal child support payments and in-kind contributions.

Implications: Results demonstrate the significant contact and contributions that NCPs report for all their children, even though these children are spread across multiple families.  We discuss the implications for our understanding of fathering in complex families and for child support policy and child well-being.