How Is Child Support Regularity Associated with Custodial Mothers' Income Packages and Economic Well-Being? Evidence from the United States

Background and Purpose: Custodial mothers—particularly single mothers—experience some of the highest rates of income poverty and income volatility in the United States. Since welfare reform ended entitlement to cash assistance, the U.S. approach to improving custodial-mother families’ mobility from poverty has focused on bolstering private responsibility—through incentivizing custodial mothers’ employment and requiring noncustodial fathers to pay child support—and reducing the role of the safety net. Prior research finds that child support receipt is associated with declines in poverty, but most of this literature does not consider whether child support is consistently received. Indeed, the proportion of custodial mothers receiving any child support receipt has declined by almost 30% since 1997, and approximately 1 in 5 mothers who receive any child support receive irregular payments. The regularity (or irregularity) of child support receipt may have implications on custodial mothers’ strategies to avoid poverty, including participation in the social safety net programs. In this study, we provide new knowledge on the associations between child support regularity and custodial mothers’ income packages, including income from public benefit programs, and economic well-being. We also examine how these associations differ by mothers’ level of education, age of youngest child, and race.

Methods: We use data from 12 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) core study (1997-2019), which includes information on monthly child support receipt, detailed data on annual family income sources, and maternal- and family-level variables. We also use PSID restricted data to merge county and state-level contextual factors that may affect the income packages and economic well-being of custodial mothers as well as child support regularity (e.g., labor market polarization, welfare generosity). Our analytic sample includes 2,665 unique custodial mothers and 12,207 person-year observations when data are pooled across waves. We conduct a series of descriptive and multivariate analyses (including OLS and fixed effects models) to examine the associations between child support regularity and mothers’ income packages (i.e., earned income, income from Temporary Assistance from Needy Families and Supplemental Security Income, and near-cash income from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and economic well-being.

Results: Approximately one third of custodial mothers received regular child support (i.e., received in at least 10 of the previous 12 months), and custodial mothers with regular child support received about 3 times the annual amount as those with irregular payments. Results from maternal fixed effects models show that receiving regular child support (versus no receipt) is associated with a 4 percentage point decline in poverty, controlling for total amount of child support income and maternal- and family-level characteristics. Receiving irregular child support (versus no receipt), however, was not associated with declines in poverty. In subsequent multivariate analyses, we will examine associations between child support regularity and mothers’ income packages as well as whether these associations differ by subgroups.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings will provide new evidence on how child support regularity contributes to custodial mothers’ mobility from poverty, with implications for social safety net programs and child support policy.