Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A vast bureaucracy, which has become increasingly automated over the last two decades, has developed to collect financial support on behalf of an ever-growing share of children in single-parent families (Freeman and Waldfogel, 2001; Legler, 1997). This expansion has increasingly embraced children born to never-married parents, who have lower SES than divorced parents. Despite increases in child support receipts among the former, their lower rates of child support receipts compared with the latter depresses overall child support receipts across the program  (Pirog & Ziol-Guest 2006).  Though earlier studies showed that the benefits of formal support for children are larger than the benefits of other sources of family income (Argys, Peters, Brooks-Gunn, and Smith, 2003) more recent studies, which focus on nonmarital children, show that the benefits of informal support may rival or exceed those of formal support (Nepomnyaschy, Magnuson, and Berger, 2012). To understand why, we must better understand how financial support from nonresident fathers benefits children.

For example, certainty about the amount and timing of formal support could affect maternal stress and the kinds of investments mothers make in the home environment. Both have been shown to affect child development (Yeung, Linver, Brooks-Gunn, 2002). However, formal support orders are inflexible and often higher than many low-income fathers can afford (Huang, Mincy, and Garfinkel, 2005). By accepting informal support instead, mothers may preserve their relationships with nonresident fathers and encourage nonresident father-child contact, which also benefits children (Huang and Pouncy, 2005; Nepomnyachy and Garfinkel 2010; Cabrera et. al., 2014).

Surprisingly few studies examine these questions, allow for differences between the effects of formal and informal support (Choi and Pyun, 2014; Baydar and Brooks-Gunn, 1994) or identify effects on children in the middle-childhood years.  

To address these gaps we examine associations between financial support from nonresident fathers over the first three years of the child’s life and child outcomes (math and reading achievement, and aggressive behavior) at age 9, allowing for changes in the way financial support is paid (i.e., formally vs. informally).  Additionally, we test mediating mechanisms emphasized by the family stress, family investment, and cascading theoretical frameworks (Conger, Elder et.al., 1994; Conger, Conger, et.al, 2002; Becker & Tomes, 1986, Forget-Dubois et al., 2009).

Using five waves of Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n=4898), we construct a sample of 692 children in single-parent families from a variety of race and ethnic groups. Using OLS models of the reduced form and path analysis, we find positive, statistically significant, though small, direct associations between financial support from nonresident fathers and children’s math achievement. While financial support is positively and significantly associated with nonresident father’ engagement in learning activities, neither this, nor any other theoretically derived mediator, partially explains the association between financial support and math achievement.  Finally, whether financial support is paid informally, formally, or switches from informal to formal does not moderate the association between financial support and math achievement. Thus, crediting fathers for informal support may reduce the cost and burden of formal child support collections without harming children.