Do Low-Income Noncustodial Fathers Trade Families? Economic Contributions to Children in Multiple Families

Background/Purpose: Parental relationships are often unstable, involving relationship dissolution, re-partnering, and, increasingly, new-partner fertility.  Social policy has struggled to respond; a key challenge is determining the appropriate child support expectations, and then trying to collect the amount owed, when there are children in multiple families.  Many fathers who have had children in multiple families cannot provide adequate levels of economic support to all their children and may feel they have to choose between providing small amounts to all children or prioritizing some children over others. Some have suggested that fathers “trade” families, being more focused on the children from their more recent relationship than the children of previous relationships. But we currently know very little about fathering when there are multiple families.  We examine 2 questions: (a)How many fathers who are behind in their obligations have multiple family responsibilities?  (b)Do fathers with multiple responsibilities support provide less support, 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 7,000 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: 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, 1/6 have had children with three or more ex-partners and have both nonresident children and resident children.  (b)While NCPs pay less support, have less contact, and report a worse relationship to the oldest nonresident child, the differences are not large: e.g., in the last 30 days, 52% of NCPs had contact with their oldest nonresident child, and 64% had contact with their youngest nonresident child.  These results (small effects in the predicted direction) generally hold in multivariate analyses controlling for background characteristics.   

Implications: Results demonstrate the significant contributions that NCPs report making to all their children, even though these children are spread across multiple families. To the extent that we know very little about how fathers with multiple families support their children, this paper provides new evidence of patterns and correlates of NCP´S contributions. Findings will inform child support policy and the way in which child support expectations are determined.