Child Support and Children's Academic Achievement

Purpose: Today at least one in four U.S. children live in single-mother families. Research has shown that these children have lower academic achievement than those who grow up with both parents, which has been mainly attributed to the economic hardship faced by these families. Due to its relevance as an income source, child support could be an important factor explaining the academic outcomes of children living in single-mother families. But, child support is a very distinctive income source. It is associated with other factors explaining children’s academic success, such as nonresident fathers’ contact with the child. Furthermore, these associations seem to vary depending on the type of child support considered: formal monetary (determined through a legal agreement), informal monetary, and in-kind. To date, few studies have examined the role of specific types of child support on children’s academic success. The majority of the literature has focused on the association between total monetary child support and academic achievement, finding a positive but not necessarily causal relation. Studies focusing on the role of formal support have found that it is not significant during early childhood and unclear during middle childhood (i.e., results are mixed). Taking advantage of unique longitudinal administrative data, this study contributes in addressing this gap by examining the role of formal child support on the academic achievement of children during middle childhood.

Methods: I use nine years of administrative data from Wisconsin (from 2005-06 through 2013-14), which provides longitudinal monthly child support and annual education data for the whole universe of children tested in grades three through eight, whose nonresident father was ordered child support. Children’s academic achievement is measured using reading and math test scores in eighth grade. The amount of child support received between third and eighth grade is measured in continuous and categorical forms to test potential nonlinear associations. I estimate OLS regressions that control for test scores in third grade, which can serve as a proxy for a potentially unobserved set of experiences from birth to the time when student is in third grade. The regressions also control for a wide set of sociodemographic characteristics, including school district fixed effects.

Results: Results show that formal child support is positively associated with children test scores. Child support seems to matter more and significantly when the amount of formal support received is above the 50th percentile of the distribution; a lower threshold than the one found for total support among children during early childhood.

Conclusions and Implications: Although there is a positive association between formal support and children’s test scores, results from this study indicate that the association is statistically significant after a threshold, which means that very small formal child support contributions do not matter for children’s education. Still, there is a wide gap of knowledge to fill in. As child support has as a primary goal to improve children’s wellbeing, having a better understanding on how formal child support improves children’s academic success is necessary to design future policies that attempt to increase support payments.