Society & Culture - Posted by Robin Lally-Rutgers on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 13:05 - 3 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...For kids of unwed, informal child support better
"One possible reason why children whose fathers provide informal support might be exhibiting better vocabulary, verbal skills, and scholastic aptitude is that these fathers not only give money to the mother when they can, but they also come around and are more involved in the child’s life," says Lenna Nepomnyaschy. (Credit: "boy on dad's shoulder" image via Shutterstock)
RUTGERS (US) — Young children of unmarried parents who live with their mother show better cognitive skills if the father provides cash support without being legally required to do so.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
A new study published in the Social Services Review also finds that when financial support is mandated by the courts, children will exhibit more aggressive behavior than those who don’t get any formal support at all.
“We want to be careful and not say that formal support is bad,” says Lenna Nepomnyaschy, assistant professor of social work at Rutgers. “For most mothers it is hugely important. But it might not be working for all types of families.”
Nepomnyaschy says prior research focused only on how financial support affected the children of divorced parents. Today, however, nearly 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And never married mothers represent the largest proportion of single parent families in the United States.
For the new research, Nepomnyaschy analyzed data of nearly 5,000 children born between 1998 and 2000 and found that, at least for young children of unmarried parents, an informal agreement between the mother and father—with paternal involvement in the child’s life—might lead to a better overall emotional environment.
“One possible reason why children whose fathers provide informal support might be exhibiting better vocabulary, verbal skills, and scholastic aptitude is that these fathers not only give money to the mother when they can, but they also come around and are more involved in the child’s life,” Nepomnyaschy says.
“So from a policy perspective we have to ask ourselves is it the money or the father’s involvement that makes the difference in the child’s life? Or is it a combination of both?”
According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, only 20 percent of unmarried fathers not living with their children paid formal child support by the time the child was 3-years-old, while 40 percent provided informal support. Many of these low-income fathers are out of work and struggling to make ends meet, Nepomnyaschy says.
Although they may not provide financial assistance on a regular basis, they often are involved in their children’s lives, support them in other ways, and give money to the mother when they can.
Researchers found that providing higher levels of informal support—more than $700 in two years—as opposed to giving nothing was associated with an increase in the cognitive skill levels of these young children.
When these fathers were mandated to provide support through the courts, however, children who received low levels of formal support, below $1,800 over two years, exhibited more aggressive behaviors than children the same age who were not getting any formal support from their fathers.
“This is definitely a puzzling result that needs to be examined further,” says Nepomnyaschy. “Maybe these fathers are violent, have problems with drugs, spank the children or have bad relationships with the mother. We don’t have a definitive answer.”
Researchers believe that low-income fathers and mothers may prefer informal support because, in many states, if the mother is receiving federal assistance like food stamps or welfare, the support check paid by the father—which is usually minimal—is kept by the state. Informal support, Nepomnyaschy says, often gives the father better leverage over visitation, child rearing and the ability to monitor how the money is spent.
“It is likely that unmarried mothers only go after formal support when their romantic relationship ends or when the father’s informal support stops,” says Nepomnyaschy.
She believes that more research is needed to determine whether these findings hold up as children get older. “We may find that the importance of formal child support to a child’s well-being increases in the long term,” says Nepomnyaschy.
“But it is important to look at how we incentivize these fathers to get involved in ways other than just providing formal support when these children are still young.”
More news from Rutgers: http://news.rutgers.edu/medrel/
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3 Comments
Jay
I’m a full-time single father. My child’s mother doesn’t pay child support. She works part-time and drinks with her friends the rest of the time.
This article is completely one-sided. There are a lot of single fathers out there. You could have worded this entire thing in a way that addressed full-time parents and absentee or part-time parents. Not all single parents are women.
I’ve seen cases similar to the situations that Katie and Jay described. It is unfortunate when either parent does not have the best interests of the children as their top priority.
Some of the difference might be the agression that many men feel about the mandated money. Quotes I’ve heard from several men, one of them, my father, another, my ex:
– The mother is taking all his money
– The mother is spending the money frivolously
– The kids don’t need the money, now that the mother has remarried
– The mother works, so why does he need to hand over any money?
However, the men above would NEVER have volunteered money. My ex did everything he could not to pay a dime. My father took jobs that paid him under the table. A co-worker moved to a state where he would be required to pay much less. My boss’s ex quit a lucrative career to bartend… then didn’t report his tips.
In other words, men that are forced to pay are usually crap to start out with.