Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

There has been growing attention to problems faced by the legal system in effectively serving the large number of low-income, unmarried parents entering family courts post-separation. About two-thirds of unmarried parents are living apart within five years of having a child together, and recent proposals could dramatically increase the number of such parents seeking legal parenting time (or, “visitation”) agreements if enacted.  For example, the Obama administration’s Child Support and Fatherhood Initiative would require states to establish legal access and visitation responsibilities in all initial child support orders by 2019. While unmarried parents entering family courts often have greater economic challenges, more complicated legal situations, and different relationship histories than their divorcing counterparts, the research base for understanding how federal proposals requiring visitation in child support cases would interact with the circumstances of fragile families still remains extremely limited.

This paper uses a mixed method approach to examine the meaning of legal parenting orders for unmarried parents and the characteristics of parents who have such agreements. The paper begins by presenting data from individual and groups interviews we conducted with low-income, unmarried mothers and fathers in New York (n=70) to develop hypotheses about how conflicted, cooperative and disengaged co-parenting could explain why some parents may be more likely than others to seek legal visitation agreements in child support cases. We then use information the Fragile Families Survey to test these hypothesis in a large sample of unmarried parents living apart (n=1,143). Findings from both interviews and multinomial logistic regressions suggest that parents are more likely to establish both visitation and child support orders within the first five years when they have heightened conflict in their relationships, and are less likely to do so when the quality of their relationship is higher or the father has been out of contact with the child. Parents’ decisions are also related to the perceived risks and benefits of engaging the legal system in these circumstances. Results from cross-lagged regression models further suggest that the association between reduced relationship quality and involvement in the legal system may be reciprocal. Diverse constituencies have called for more research to develop safe, effective, and targeted visitation mechanisms for unmarried parents and their children entering family court. The paper concludes by discussing the potential implications of our findings for recent proposals to integrate visitation into the child support process.