Sharing Care and Sharing Costs? Allocating Child Related Expenses across Households in the United States and Finland

Background: Shared care is an increasingly common post-separation living arrangement for children across countries (Steinbach et al. 2021). The shift from sole to shared arrangements not only suggests that a child’s time is allocated differently between homes, but this shift may alter how parents share resources and the costs of children across households. Child support payments are not always an expectation in shared care arrangements, which may result in dissimilar outcomes in terms of how parents share child-related expenses in different countries. The present study provides a comparative analysis across two different welfare states of the associations of post-separation placement arrangements with child support outcomes and expense sharing in Finland and Wisconsin (representing the US). Two aims guide this work: (a) to describe the relationship between children’s post-separation arrangements and child support payment receipt, and (b) to describe the relationship between children’s post-separation arrangements and parental contributions to child related expenses.

Data and Methods: We harness survey data collected from divorced (or separated) parents in Wisconsin (2020) and Finland (2019), which were designed to enable comparative analysis. Wisconsin participants were drawn from divorce records and were interviewed 7-11 years after the divorce petition. The final study sample consisted of 219 mothers with sole placement, 54 mothers with equal shared placement, and 122 mothers with unequal shared placement. For the Finnish participants, a sample of parents living apart with the child’s other parent for at least 6 years was drawn from a register-based dataset. The final study sample consisted of about 1387 mothers with sole placement, 335 mothers with equal shared placement, and 478 mothers with unequal shared placement.

We will first conduct a series of descriptive and regression analyses examining child support payment as a function of post-separation placement arrangement type. Second, we will investigate how parental sharing of specific expenses (e.g. school, daycare, clothes) may vary by care arrangement. All analyses will be conducted separately for the Wisconsin and Finnish samples and estimates will be compared across samples in terms of direction and statistical significance.

Results: The results show that parents with shared care share the economic responsibility of the child less commonly through child support payments (in Finland 23% and in Wisconsin 52% of shared placement parents) compared to parents with sole placement (in Finland 65% and in Wisconsin 79% of sole placement parents). In addition to any child support payments made, parents in shared care more commonly share child related expenses, though not always equally.

Conclusion and Implications: Across countries parents can decide, to varying degrees, how they share the economic responsibility of the child post-separation. As shared care arrangements are increasingly common, child support arrangements may be less common. Thus the onus to allocate costs of rearing children rests with parents. As our results show, for some, this might lead to unequal sharing of costs. The differences in the public support systems between the US and Finland, however, might mean that some of this disproportion in cost sharing is compensated by the state in Finland.