Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Families with children have become increasingly complex. Parental relationships are often unstable, involving relationship dissolution, re-partnering, and, increasingly, new-partner fertility.  Social policy has struggled to respond to these family changes; one of the main challenges confronting policy-makers is determining the appropriate child support expectations in these situations, and then trying to collect the amount owed. There is growing awareness that a significant number of fathers have limited resources to provide financial support to children even in one family, and more recent recognition that many fathers who have had children in multiple families do not have the resources to provide adequate levels of economic support to all their children.

If fathers do not have the resources to provide full support to all their nonresident children, they may feel they have to choose between providing small amounts to all children or prioritizing some children over others.  Some observers have suggested that some fathers “trade” families, being more focused on the children from their more recent relationship than the children of previous relationships. While the research on families with multiple-partner fertility is increasing, we know very little about the extent to which fathers with multiple families provide support to all their children versus only some, with potentially large consequences for child well-being.    

This paper provides new data from the Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration program, a federally-funded eight-state intervention for noncustodial parents (NCPs) who are behind in their child support payments and having employment difficulties.  We use data from baseline surveys of over 7,000 NCPs who enrolled in the demonstration between its onset in October 2013 and September 2015, making this the largest sample available of an understudied group that is quite important for social policy. 

Preliminary findings show that only about one-third of these NCPs had nonresident children with only one custodial parent.  More complex family responsibilities are common, with one in six having had children with three or more ex-partners and having both nonresident children and some children who lived with them. In addition to documenting these patterns and their correlates, we focus on NCPs who have nonresident children in two or more families and compare NCPs’ reported contributions to their oldest nonresident child and their youngest nonresident child.  While NCPs pay more support, have more contact, and report a better relationship to the younger child, the differences are not large.  For example, in the last 30 days, 64% of NCPs had contact with their youngest nonresident child, and 52% had contact with their oldest nonresident child. We also report on NCPs’ formal child support contributions, informal contributions in cash, and informal in-kind contributions. We examine  the extent to which NCPs are supporting some but not all of their children, and, when they are supporting all, compare the level of contributions to their youngest and oldest nonresident child.   Results demonstrate the significant contributions that NCPs report making to all their children, even though these children are spread across multiple families.  Implications for child support policy are discussed.