Nonresident Fathers' Involvement with Children and Mothers' Well-Being

Background and Purpose: More than half of children in the US will spend time living apart from one of their biological parents, in most cases, their fathers. Recent evidence across multiple studies and diverse samples points to the strong protective effects of nonresident fathers’ involvement, including financial support and engagement with children, for children’s well-being. Theory suggests that fathers’ financial and social involvement may affect children directly through better relationships and increased resources, and indirectly by reducing mothers’ economic precarity and stress. However, prior empirical evidence is quite mixed and these mixed results may be due to differences in measures of mothers’ well-being and fathers’ involvement, differences in ages of children included and samples analyzed, and the rigor of analytic methods. In the current study, we use panel data to examine the associations of a comprehensive set of measures of nonresident father involvement with mother’s material hardship, parenting stress, and depression over a 10-year period, when children are between ages 5 and 15.

Methods: We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a panel study of nearly 5000 children born in large urban areas in the US, followed until age 15. Mothers’ well-being is measured as her self-reported: experiences of any material hardship in her household in the past year, presence of depression, and parenting stress. Nonresident fathers’ involvement is measured as his provision of formal and informal cash child support, provision of in-kind support, days of contact with the child, and frequency of engagement in developmentally appropriate activities. Analyses are based on pooled cross-sections across three waves of data, when children were 5, 9, and 15 years old, resulting in a sample of 5,276 observations on 2,504 unique children. We estimate OLS and linear probability models, as well as random effects and individual fixed effects models to address potential unobserved heterogeneity between families with more and less involved fathers.

Results: Overall, we find that nonresident fathers’ involvement is associated with mother’s well-being, with important differences by the type of involvement considered. Specifically, we find that fathers’ engagement with children and a comprehensive index of voluntary involvement (engagement, in-kind support, and informal cash support) are associated with lower probability of mothers’ experiences of material hardship and depression and lower parenting stress. And these results are robust to inclusion of individual fixed effects, measuring changes over time within individuals. We find little evidence that formal or informal cash support alone are associated with any measures of well-being, though in some models, total amount of cash support was associated with lower material hardship.

Implications/Conclusions: These results point to the importance of nonresident fathers’ engagement with and voluntary material contributions to children and that this type of involvement can improve mothers’ well-being and contribute to a more highly resourced and stable economic environment for children. This points to the need to consider policies that promote the ability of nonresident fathers, most of whom are lower-income, to spend time with and contribute to their children.