Nonresident Father Involvement and Child Economic Well-Being: Exploring the Impact of Financial and Material Support in Low-Income Single-Mother Families

Background and Purpose: Children living with single parents, who are mostly mothers, are more likely to experience poverty and insufficient care compared to their counterparts living with both parents. To counteract the disadvantage of single parenthood, nonresident father involvement has been increasingly emphasized and studied over the last few decades. Overall, evidence demonstrates a strong association between nonresident father involvement and child well-being. However, findings on nonresident fathers’ financial and material support are somewhat mixed, reporting insignificant or weak associations compared to other forms of involvement. Such findings may potentially impact state decisions on child support policies (i.e., pass-through and disregard policies), despite the many low-income families who greatly benefit from the additional income. Therefore, the study addressed the following research question: Are nonresident fathers’ financial and material support associated with child economic well-being among low-income families, even after controlling for other forms of father involvement and sociodemographic factors?

Methods: Data are from the Future of Families Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,898), a longitudinal birth cohort study. The analytic sample includes mothers with full data in Year 5 (n = 647) on child economic well-being (mother’s household income to poverty ratio), father’s financial support (sum of formal and informal support amount), material support (average score of how often the father buys things for child), quality of mother-father relationship, father-child contact, formal agreement, and sociodemographic information. Hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to examine the degree to which mothers’ sociodemographic characteristics (Step 1), father’s financial and material support (Step 2), and father’s relationship with mother and child (Step 3) affect child economic well-being.

Results: The fully adjusted model (F(13, 633)=18.66, p=.0001, R²=.277) showed that financial support (b=.087, t=2.55, p=.011) and material support (b=-.177, t=-2.47, p=.014) were statistically significant even after controlling for other factors. The negative association between material support and child economic well-being suggests that families who receive material support may be receiving less financial support. Sociodemographic characteristics (being White vs. Black, having higher education, receiving welfare) explained 25.4% (R²=.254) of the variance in the first model (F(7, 639)=31, p=.0001, R²=.254) and were still significant in later models. The addition of variables increased variance by ΔR²=.017 (Model 2) and ΔR²=.006 (Model 3).

Conclusion and Implications: The findings demonstrate that financial support is positively associated with child economic well-being of low-income families. However, even with financial support, children living with single mothers who are Black, less educated, or receive welfare tend to experience lower economic well-being. Such sociodemographic characteristics match those of families receiving TANF. To enhance the economic well-being of children in these families, policies should be more lenient on the amount of support to be passed through and disregarded when determining TANF assistance. In addition, increasing nonresident fathers’ child support payment is important but difficult due to barriers to stable employment and income. Therefore, collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers is required to provide effective, target-specific solutions to enhance the ability of nonresident fathers to pay child support, ensuring the transmission of income to low-income single-mother households.