Child Support and Young Children's Nutritional Status in Colombia

Background and Purpose. Child support, defined as an economic transfer from a noncustodial parent—usually the father—to a custodial parent, reduces income poverty among custodial-mother families in a wide range of countries. Less is known about the extent to which this monetary transfer has distinct associations with child well-being, especially in less-developed countries. Child support may have a distinct relationship with child well-being by increasing incentives to spend family income on children, influencing family dynamics in beneficial ways, or simply avoiding the stigma associated with cash welfare.

This study examines the role of child support in young children’s nutritional status in Colombia. I focus on child chronic malnutrition, a social problem that has harmful consequences on child development and remains particularly high in the developing world. While Colombia has seen a significant decline of child malnutrition over the last two decades, the percentage of children affected by this phenomenon remains high, especially among the most vulnerable populations. The prevalence of child malnutrition along with dramatic family changes and very little extant research on concomitant child support issues make Colombia an interesting case study for developing countries.

Methods. I use data from the Colombian Longitudinal Survey of Wealth, Income, Labor and Land (ELCA) for 499 children aged 0 to 5 in custodial-mother families in urban Colombia. I use probit models with extensive controls, propensity score matching (PSM) techniques, and fixed effects models to estimate the association between child support and child chronic malnutrition. Child support is measured with an indicator variable of whether the family was living in a household that received any amount of child support during the year before the survey. This amount includes both in-kind and cash support as well as formal (with a legal order) and informal (without a legal order) support. I calculate four different measures of chronic malnutrition (any, low, moderate, and severe) using height-for-age z-scores and cut-off points that classify children in each different status as defined by the World Health Organization.

Results. Analyses using probit models and PSM techniques suggest that there is a statistically significant decline in chronic malnutrition among children who received child support, net of other factors associated with chronic malnutrition. Children who receive any child support in the year before anthropometric measures were taken are between 7 and 10 percentage points less likely to experience chronic malnutrition at the time of the survey. While this finding is sensitive to alternative specifications, this preliminary information indicates that a noncustodial father’s monetary contributions may have a distinct influence on his child. Final analyses will include fixed effects models to adjust for time-invariant unobserved factors with persistent effects.

Implications. This finding could have implications for interventions designed to promote child well-being in Colombia and other Latin American countries, especially those focused on improving nutritional outcomes such as conditional cash transfer programs; efforts to integrate child support systems into the social safety net could leverage the potential positive influence that child support has on child well-being.