COMPETING OBLIGATIONS, CHILD SUPPORT, AND MEN’S
VISITATION WITH NONRESIDENTIAL CHILDREN
January 10, 2019
Karen Benjamin Guzzo
This work was funded by a grant from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.
Abstract
High rates of nonmarital fertility and divorce mean that many fathers do not live with some or all of their children. Using the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, which interviewed men for the first time, this research examines the factors which influence men’s visitation with nonresidential children. Nonresident fathers are more disadvantaged than fathers with only resident children, and many nonresident fathers have competing obligations in the form of new relationships and coresidential children (both biological and nonbiological). One-fourth of men with nonresidential children report no visits in the past year, but over one-third report seeing their children weekly or more. Current relationship status, relationship status at first birth, child coresidence history, and particularly child support payments emerge as important predictors of visitation in multivariate models. There is no evidence that the presence of nonbiological coresidential children affects visitation, although the number of nonresidential children is positively related to visitation.
Keywords: fathers, nonresident children, visitation
Introduction
With a fairly high, though stable, divorce rate and rising levels of nonmarital childbearing, combined with the volatility of such unions, more and more children will live apart from at least one of their parents, usually the father, at some point in their lives. The growth in nonresident fathers has been accompanied by the recognition that father absence can have severe and long-lasting consequences for children’s well-being (see review by Amato 2000). Yet father nonresidence does not universally translate into father absence; some fathers remain actively involved with their nonresident children long after the relationship with the mother dissolves. And on the other hand, despite the fact that children who grow up in single-mother households are usually worse off compared to their peers in two-parent households (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994), evidence increasingly suggests that nonresident fathers are a disadvantaged group whose involvement with their children may not be particularly beneficial (Sorensen and Zibman 2002). The existing research on nonresident fathers is often conflicting and, at best, incomplete. The purpose of the present research is to improve our understanding of who nonresident fathers are and how involved they are with their children by comparing fathers with at least one nonresidential child to fathers with no nonresidential children and examining the factors that influence visitation with nonresidential children, particularly why some fathers seem to abandon their children completely while others remain highly involved. This work moves beyond prior studies on nonresident father visitation to include the influence of competing obligations, including those to new families and children, as well as factors concerning men’s entrance into and experience of parenthood.
Background
On the whole, fairly little is known about nonresident fathers due to data limitations (Garfinkel, McLanahan, and Hanson 1998), though this has been improving in recent years. From work comparing U.S. Census Bureau or Current Population Survey information, though, we know that there is generally a large discrepancy between the number of custodial mothers and the numbers of men who report having nonresidential children, but these data sources cannot contain the more detailed information necessary to thoroughly understand complex family behaviors (Graham and Beller 2002). Unfortunately, household-based surveys typically under-represent low-income and minority men (those most likely to be nonresident fathers) due to their loose attachment to households and their disproportionate rates of military participation and institutionalization (Hernandez and Brandon 2002). The current work uses a new, nationally representative survey of men (and women) that uses an innovative way to gather information on men’s childbearing and childrearing, Cycle 6 (2002) of the National Survey of Family Growth.
Still, there is an emerging, if complex, picture of nonresident fathers. A consistent finding among noncustodial fathers is that involvement is generally low and declines over time (Mott 1990; Furstenberg and Harris 1992; Furstenberg 1995). However, father involvement may vary by father’s characteristics, and there is growing recognition that nonresident fathers are a diverse group. Whereas once fathers largely became nonresident after a separation or divorce, many fathers are now nonresident for most, if not all, of their children’s lives through the rise of nonmarital fertility. Even fathers who were living with the mother at birth have a high risk of becoming nonresident due the fragility of cohabiting unions (Carlson, McLanahan, and England 2004). There are clear socioeconomic differences between divorced and never-married fathers: divorced fathers are more likely to be white and tend to have higher levels of education, while men who were unmarried at the time of birth are more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities and have lower levels of education. The differences in how men become nonresident fathers may have a strong impact for their subsequent paternal involvement beyond socioeconomic differences; men who were married at the time of birth almost uniformly have legal paternity established, which leads to formal visitation and child support arrangements, and, more subjectively, to have spent more time living with their children and engaging in the daily activities of parenting compared to men who were unmarried, especially those who never lived with the child’s mother. As a group, the evidence suggests that nonresident fathers are more disadvantaged than resident fathers, though much of this work uses rather dated or selective samples. These men tend to have low incomes, which can impede payment of child support, and often have new families to support (Sorensen 1997; Garfinkel, McLanahan, and Hanson 1998).
Factors Affecting Visitation
Although more frequent contact with nonresident fathers has been linked to better emotional well-being and academic success among children (Perloff and Bucker 1996; Coley 1998; Amato and Gilbreth 1999), visitation with nonresident fathers is far from uniform. Several factors may influence the frequency that men see their nonresidential children.
Socioeconomic Status
Studies of nonresident fathers havegenerally demonstrated that fathers with higher levels of education and income have higher levels of father involvement (Furstenberg, Nord, Peterson, & Zill 1983; Seltzer, Schaeffer, and Charng 1989; Seltzer 1991; King, Harris, and Heard 2004). Although the ideal of the father as the breadwinner has waned over time, it still has a strong influence on how men (and others) see their roles in the family. Beyond formal child support, the activities that nonresident fathers and their children do together, such as going to the movies or shopping, often cost money. Men who feel unable to contribute may have feelings of guilt or shame and curtail their visits or withdraw from parenting (Doherty, Kouneski, and Erickson 1998; Harris and Marmer 1996). And of course, the ability to pay child support is important; this issue will be discussed in greater detail below.
There are likely to be racial and ethnic differences as well. Despite the popular image of minority fathers, especially those who bear children outside of marriage, as men who abandon their children, empirical evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. In particular, African American men exhibit very high rates of involvement with their young children (Isaacs and Leon 1987; Mott 1990; Seltzer 1991; Stier and Tienda 1993; King 1994). Hispanics, conversely, appear to be the most likely to not visit their children (Seltzer and Bianchi 1988; King 1994)
Finally, we might see differences according to men’s own familial background. Men who spent time living without their biological fathers, especially those who lived in single-parent households, might repeat their own childhood experiences (which likely included little paternal involvement) as adults. Conversely, men may make a conscious decision to be more involved with their children than their own fathers were (Nelson, Clampet-Lundquist, and Edin 2002).
Past and present family experiences
Most of the research on father involvement has focused on separated and divorced fathers (Coley 2001; Carlson, McLanahan, and Brooks-Gunn 2005). Yet with over a third of all births occurring to unmarried women (and forty percent of those births to cohabiting couples), the need to understand father involvement across a wider spectrum of relationship experiences is becoming increasingly pressing. The limited evidence suggests that separated and divorced fathers see their children more often than never-married fathers (King 1994), though cohabitors have more involvement that those who never lived together (Landale and Oropesa 2001), and that the relationship between children and fathers is particularly fragile if they never or only briefly lived together (Lerman 1993).
It has also been suggested that men’s involvement with their nonresident children declines when they form new relationships and especially when they have new children (Furstenberg et al 1983). Most divorced men go on to form new relationships (Bumpass, Sweet, and Cherlin 1991), and this is almost certainly the case among never married fathers as well. Men may feel pressured not to divert resources away from current union, and current partners may resent having to plan their lives around their partner’s children (and thus their partner’s children’s mother). In addition, new partners may be reluctant to take on ambiguous stepmother roles. Finally, jealousy may play a role; there is growing evidence that paternal claims from previous families are a source of jealousy and conflict between men and their new partners (Furstenberg 1995; Edin and Kefalas, 2005).
There is also concern that as men form new relationships, they are having new children, becoming social parents to their partner’s children, and withdrawing as parents to their nonresident children, in essence “swapping” families (Furstenberg et al 1983; Manning and Smock 2000). Though unflattering to men, the argument essentially suggests that men’s parental obligations are largely based on residence (Furstenberg and Cherlin 1991; Seltzer 1991; Furstenberg 1995) and that men tend to concentrate their attention and resources to their current household, even if means diverting resources from their nonresidential children. However, Manning and Smock’s work (2000) suggests that only biological resident children, not stepchildren, negatively impact men’s investment with nonresident children. It is also possible that the number of nonresidential children can play a role. On the one hand, simply having more nonresident children can increase the likelihood that fathers see at least some of their children, but on the other hand, having a large number of nonresident children can overwhelm men and discourage involvement. This may especially be the case if the children are with different partners (Manning, Stewart, and Smock 2003; Carlson et al 2005) – men who have obligations to multiple households may have their time and monetary resources stretched particularly thin. Moreover, men who have children with multiple partners may do so precisely because they are the type of men who engage in serial sexual relationships but take no responsibility for the children their unions produce.
Child support, coresidence history, and paternity establishment
Another issue which is strongly related to visitation is the payment of child support. As Koball and Principe (2002) note, child support forges a monetary connection between nonresident fathers and their children. Men who pay child support often feel entitled to see their children, since they are actively contributing to their children’s lives. In visiting their children, they may also want to ensure that their support is benefiting their children rather than other household members. Of course, the relationship can go the other way: men who see (or want to see) their children often may pay child support as a way of securing access. Custodial mothers often act as gatekeepers; many (though certainly not all) motherslimit visitation by nonresident fathers who fail to contribute to the costs of childrearing (Bloomer, Sipe, and Ruedt 2002). Regardless of the direction, empirical evidence shows that men who pay child support see their children more frequently (Graham and Beller 2002; Koball and Principe 2002; Mincy, Garfinkel, and Nepomnyaschy 2005). There are also informal and nonmonetary ways that nonresident fathers contribute. Many provide clothing and transportation and share in the child care responsibilities by watching children when the custodial mothers work, though these aspects have received far less attention in quantitative studies due to the difficulty in measurement (Nepomnyaschy and Garfinkel 2006) and are not included in the present analysis.
Unmarried fathers who lived with their children at some point, especially during the early years, are much more likely to continue to be involved with their children than men who never lived with their children (Carlson et al 2005). Men who live with their children engage in the daily activities of parenting and likely feel a stronger bond with their child; their feelings of paternal responsibility and love may encourage and facilitate an ongoing relationship when coresidence ends. There is also evidence that men who have taken legal responsibility for their children, by establishing paternity, are more likely to visit their children (Mincy et al 2005), though the research on this issue is limited and often based on samples of very young children.
DATA AND METHODS
This paper uses Cycle 6 (2002) of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), released in early 2005. The NSFG is a nationally representative, household-based cross-sectional survey of Americans aged 15-44. Past cycles of the data have interviewed only women, but the most recent wave included men for the first time. The NSFG includes 4,928 men aged 15-44, and this analysis focuses on men with at least one nonresidential child, with a sample size of 616 (out of 1,726 men with at least one child who had nonmissing information on birth/child characteristics).
Although the women’s fertility histories are collected in the traditional manner, in a separate module by dates of all births, men’s fertility experiences are situated within the detailed relationship history, which includes information on current spouse/partner, last three sexual partners, up to three former wives, and the first premarital cohabiting partner. That is, in gathering information about men’s current and prior partners, men are asked whether they had any children with each partner. In addition, men are then asked if they had any children that have not yet been discussed and whether these children are with the same woman. Situating fertility within a relationship context is considered a more accurate way to measure men’s fertility, especially outside of marriage (Groves, Benson, Mosher et al 2005). Based on the information from the fertility history, then, men are asked questions regarding their involvement. Unfortunately, this technique cannot solve the more general problem of the under-representation of low-income and minority men found in household based surveys.
Visitation with nonresidential children is based on the following question asked of all men who reported having one or more nonresidential child under age 19 who was still alive and was not adopted or placed in foster care: “During the last 12 months, about how often did you see or have a visit with [this child/ either of these children/ any of these children]?” Responses were measured on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 6 (every day). Unfortunately, this question does not reference particular children but refers to any and all residential children, and it is certainly possible that men may see different nonresidential children, particularly those in different households, at different frequencies, and it is not possible to determine whether this level of visitation applies to all children. Although the original variable is an ordinal variable, I am particularly interested in the predictors of complete father absence and of highly involved fathers. As such, in the multivariate analyses, this question is recoded into two dichotomous variables representing the extremes of father visitation: no visits at all and weekly or more often.
Socioeconomic and demographic control variables include age, race/ethnicity, nativity, family structure at age 14, and whether the respondent’s mother had a birth prior to age 18. The men’s socioeconomic variables include his current level of education, whether he currently works full-time or not, and total reported household income in the past twelve months; it is expected that men with higher levels of education and employment will be less likely to have no visits and more likely to have frequent visits.