Child support and father-child contact: testing reciprocal pathways.
I use three waves of panel data to examine the relationship between child support payments and fathers' contact with their nonmarital children. I disaggregate support into fathers' formal and informal payments and incorporate cross-lagged effects models to identify the direction of causality between payments and contact. After including the behavior from the prior wave (lagged term) and a rich set of family characteristics, I find a marginally significant effect of paying formally at Time 1 on the likelihood of contact at Time 2 but no effect of contact at Time 1 on formal payments at Time 2. In the first examination of the relationship between informal support and father-child contact, I find a strong, positive reciprocal relationship between the likelihood and frequency of father-child contact and the likelihood and amount of informal support, with slightly stronger and more consistent effects of contact on payments than of payments on contact.
Nepomnyaschy
Lenna
L
Columbia University School of Social Work, 1255 Amsterdam Avenue, Room 718, New York, NY 10027, USA. LN77@columbia.edu
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002654:Child Care / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003625:Data Collection; D005191:Family Characteristics; D005195:Family Relations; D005219:Father-Child Relations; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D017533:Marital Status; D008875:Middle Aged; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D013995:Time; D014481:United States