Purpose: With dramatic changes in family demography, behaviors and attitudes since the 1960s, fathers' roles in family life have substantially broadened such that today, fathers are involved in childrearing in numerous ways. Along with this shift in roles has come a growing recognition that father involvement—across multiple domains—may offer important benefits to children. Consequently, researchers have increasingly endeavored to study what fathers do and whether/how it matters, and policymakers have paid greater attention to how the tax and transfer system can most effectively encourage fathers to become or stay positively involved with their children. Yet, our understanding of the benefits for children of fathers' investments in their lives remains limited, particularly for children born to unmarried parents. In this paper, we use new data to examine fathers' investments with children in three areas—direct engagement in activities, emotional support of mothers, and economic resources—and we evaluate the extent to which these investments are linked with children's behavioral problems at about age 3.

Methods: We use new data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal, birth cohort survey designed to track the conditions and capabilities of unmarried parents in urban areas—along with a comparison group of married parents—and their children over time. Both mothers and fathers were interviewed at the time of their baby's birth, and follow-up interviews occurred about one and three years later. These data contain rich information on paternal involvement and children's outcomes, as well as parents' individual and dyadic characteristics.

In this paper, we present descriptive statistics on the levels of fathers' investments with children across the three domains (engagement, emotional support of mother, and economic resources), separately for resident and non-resident fathers. Then, we estimate a series of OLS regression models to examine how fathers' investments affect children's behavioral problems, controlling for an increasing number of confounding covariates.

Findings: We find that there are bivariate associations between all three measures of fathers' investments and children's behavioral problems. However, once we control for key background characteristics in our multivariate models, only fathers' emotional support of mothers has a significant impact on children's behavior.

These findings have important implications for public policy. The current Administration intends to strengthen unmarried parents' relationships and encourage marriage through relationship education and/or skills training. Motivating this attention to couples' relationships is the belief that strengthening mother-father relationships will improve their parenting and ultimately enhance children's wellbeing. Yet, this question remains largely untested with national samples. Our results suggest that the current policy initiatives to strengthen couples' relationships could potentially improve children's wellbeing if interventions could actually improve couples' abilities to relate in a supportive and healthy manner—a non-trivial assumption. If such were the case, public investments in such programs could potentially serve to further enhance the observed benefits for children of fathers' private investments.