(WITHDRAWN) States' Use of Driver's License Suspension and Fathersã¢â‚€â„¢ Involvement with Their Nonresident Children

Millions of people across the US every year have their driver’s license suspended, often indefinitely, for non-driving related reasons, including unpaid court fines and fees, unpaid child support, drug offenses, failure to appear in court, and failure to pay parking tickets (Salas & Ciolfi, 2017). Because access to public transportation in most of the US is severely limited, and driving is critical for daily activities, the vast majority of those who lose their license continue to drive illegally, putting themselves at risk for further legal and monetary sanctions. Not surprisingly, because these penalties are a direct result of inability to pay, nearly all those affected are Americans of lower socio-economic status and those of color.

Today, a quarter of children in the US have a parent (most often their father) living outside their home, with much higher rates among children of color (55% for Black children & 31% of Latino/Hispanic children) and of lower-SES (80% for children of parents without a high school degree). Much prior work has documented the benefits of nonresident fathers’ involvement (both social and monetary) for numerous domains of child well-being. In this study we examine the associations between state driver’s license suspension policies and fathers’ involvement with their nonresident children.

Our study merges nearly 20 years of newly collected longitudinal data on states’ license suspension policies with six waves of data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a population-based study of nearly 5000 children born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000, and followed up at ages 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15. The study’s 3:1 oversample of births to unmarried parents presents the ideal sample to explore the effects of such policies on nonresident fathers’ involvement, including frequency of engagement in developmentally-appropriate activities, provision of formal child support, and provision of informal cash and non-cash support. Policy data on license suspension includes whether states suspend driver’s licenses for: (1) drug offenses (other than DUI), (2) failure to appear in court, (3) failure to pay court fines and fees, (4) failure to pay tickets, and (5) failure to pay child support.

Results from pooled ordinary least squares and linear probability regression models, including a rich set of individual, family, state-level controls, and state and year fixed effects, indicate that living in states with all such policies in place, compared to states with only a few such polices, is associated with less frequent engagement with children, less formal child support, and less non-cash support among nonresident fathers. These results suggest that driver’s license suspension policies harm not only those being penalized, but also create harm for children in single parent families, who are most likely to experience economic disadvantage.