Mothers’ Reports of Nonresident Fathers’ Involvement With Their Children: Revisiting the Relationship Between Child Support Payment and Visitation

• Date: 01 February 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2008.00534.x
• Author: Chien‐Chung Huang
• Published date: 01 February 2009

CHIEN-CHUNG HUANG Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Mothers’ Reports of Nonresident Fathers’

Involvement With Their Children: Revisiting

the Relationship Between Child Support Payment

and Visitation

Nonresident fathers’ f‌inancial support and time

are both important to children’s well-being,

although the association between these two

types of involvement is mixed in the literature.

Using the 1994 – 2004 waves of the Current

Population Survey-Child Support Supplement,

this article examined the associations between

mothers’ reports of child support payments and

visitation. The results indicated that about 36%

of nonresident fathers did not visit their chil-

dren at all, and the distribution of visitation

was highly skewed. Therefore, zero-inf‌lated

Poisson regression was used, and the results

indicated that the amount of child support pay-

ments was positively associated with the onset

but not the frequency of visitation. Policy and

research implications are discussed.

Compared to children in two-parent families,

children in single-mother families are more

likely to experience economic hardship, to have

lower educational achievement, and to have

more behavioral problems (Amato, 2005; Krein &

Beller, 1988; McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994).

Limited f‌inancial and nonf‌inancial involvement

by nonresident fathers is often identif‌ied as

a key reason for these negative outcomes (Ama-

to & Gilbreth, 1999; Baydar & Brooks-Gunn,

1994; Furstenberg, Morgan, & Allison, 1987;

Lamb, 2004). With respect to f‌inancial involve-

ment, the federal and state governments have

strengthened the child support enforcement sys-

tem over the past three decades in an attempt to

prevent nonresident fathers from f‌inancially

abandoning their children (Garf‌inkel, Meyer, &

McLanahan, 1998; Lerman & Sorenson, 2003;

Pirog & Ziol-Guest, 2006). This enforcement

system, which has shown some success, espe-

cially for mothers on welfare, has changed from

one in which payment was often discretionary to

one in which payment is usually compelled and

automatic (Huang, Garf‌inkel, & Waldfogel,

2004; Garf‌inkel, Meyer, et al., 1998; Wolk &

Schmahl, 1999).

As the probability of nonresident fathers pay-

ing child support increases, so may nonresident

fathers’ nonf‌inancial involvement with their chil-

dren. Economic and role theories, however, offer

ambiguous predictions of the effects of paying

child support on spending time with children. In

conventional economic theory, the relationship

between f‌inancial and nonf‌inancial involvement

could be either complementary or substitutive.

For example, Weiss and Willis (1985) argued that

children can be viewed as collective consumption

School of Social Work, Rutgers, the State University of

New Jersey, 536 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

(huangc@rci.rutgers.edu), and Social Policy Research

Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Key Words: child support payments, divorced fathers, father

involvement, visitation, zero-inf‌lated Poisson regression.

54 Family Relations 58 (February 2009): 54–64

A Publication of

the National Council on

Family Relations