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Journal Article We present new estimates of unwed fathers' ability to pay child support. Prior research relied on surveys that drastically undercounted nonresident unwed fathers and provided no link to their children who lived in separate households. To overcome these limitations, previous research assumed assortative mating and that each mother partnered with one father who was actually eligible to pay support and had no other child support obligations. Because the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study contains data on couples, multiple-partner fertility, and a rich array of other previously unmeasured…
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Journal Article To study changes in nonresident father contact since the 1970s, the authors pooled data from 4 national surveys: the National Survey of Children (1976), the National Survey of Families and Households (1987 ? 1988), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1996), and the National Survey of America's Families (2002). On the basis of mothers' reports, levels of contact rose significantly across surveys. Paying child support and having a nonmarital birth were strongly related to contact frequency. The increase in contact may be beneficial in general but problematic if it occurs within the…
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Journal Article 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 children at all, and the distribution of visitation was highly skewed. Therefore, zero-inflated Poisson regression was used, and the results…
