Nonresident Fathers and Young Adults’ Economic Well-Being

Background and Purpose: Nearly one-quarter of US children live in a single-parent family (most often with mothers), the largest proportion among wealthy nations. A large body of work points to the importance of nonresident fathers’ financial and non-financial involvement in their children’s lives for numerous indicators of children’s economic security and well-being. However, economic changes and social policies over the last several decades have created tremendous levels of economic precarity for men without a college degree, many of whom are nonresident fathers. Some research suggests that these fathers’ contributions through the formal child support system, the only system focused explicitly on children in single-parent families, improves their children’s economic well-being. However, other recent work, highlighting the economic difficulties facing many nonresident fathers, finds no benefits through formal child support, but substantial benefits through other types of involvement.

Methods: The current study examines the long-term associations of nonresident fathers’ involvement with the economic well-being of their children as they become young adults, using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), the longest-running population-based birth cohort study in the US. The FFCWS has been following approximately 5000 children born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000 from the child’s birth (baseline) through child ages 1, 3, 5, 9, 15, and 22. The study oversampled births to unmarried parents (3:1 ratio), resulting in a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse sample.

Based on prior work, fathers’ involvement is classified into involuntary (formal child support) and voluntary (time spent, engagement in activities, closeness, informal cash support, and in-kind support) forms. We estimate associations of these types of involvement over their children’s lives (ages 5 to 15) with their economic well-being as young adults, measured as: disconnection from work and school (neither working, nor in college, a training program, the military); experience of material hardship in the past year; and their household income to poverty ratio, based on income from all sources divided by the poverty threshold for their household size and composition.

Results: Analyses are based on young adults interviewed at year 22 (2990), who lived with their biological mother and had a nonresident biological father for at least one wave between child ages 5 and 15 (N~1600). Only 1/3 of young adults received any formal child support (involuntary involvement) from fathers over their lifetimes, consistent with national estimates, while 85% experienced voluntary involvement from their fathers. Multivariate results indicate that fathers’ voluntary involvement is associated with greater economic security among young adults, while involuntary involvement (formal support) is much less so.

Conclusions and Implications: These results confirm prior work that nonresident fathers’ provision of formal child support, given substantial economic precarity of these men, cannot be relied upon to improve economic security for their children. However, fathers’ time spent, engagement in activities, closeness with children, and provision of in-kind support appear to have long-term benefits for children as they transition to young adulthood.