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Mothers who experience intimate partner violence (IPV) are at increased risk for experiencing workplace instability in the form of absence from paid employment and job loss. In a cross-sectional study, we investigate if experiences of IPV inhibit work stability among low-income women as well as if the receipt of child care subsidies has a moderating effect on the relationship. Using data from the Illinois Families Study, we tested the relationships between IPV, work outcomes, and recipient of child care subsidies in a series of multivariate regressions. Findings indicate IPV is associated with reduced hours worked among low-income mothers and increased unemployment among low-income mothers. However, both of these relationships are moderated by receipt of child care subsidies suggesting that mothers who experience IPV can maintain employment at the same level as women not experiencing IPV with receipt of child care subsidies. Our findings indicate the importance of receiving child care subsidies among low-income mothers and support subsidy accessibility to survivors of IPV. Results of our study are limited in regard to the age of the data, the cross-sectional use of the data, and the lack of a control group that was not receiving any type of government assistance., Author(s): Kathryn Showalter [sup.1] , Kathryn Maguire-Jack [sup.1] , Mi-Youn Yang [sup.2] , Kelly M. Purtell [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0001 2285 7943, grid.261331.4, College of Social Work, The [...]

This study examines the relationships between ethnicity-based variations in nonresident fathers' involvement and children's behavior. Using weighted least squares regression analysis, this study investigates nonresident father involvement and children's behavior based on a nationally representative sample of children in the National Survey of America's Families. After controlling for family context variables, nonresident father involvement through increased frequency of visits was positively associated with better child behavior. The payment of formal or informal child support by nonresident fathers was also associated with better behavior. This study suggests that the impact of nonresident father involvement on child behavior varies among African American, Anglo, and Latino families. Keywords Nonresident father * Child behavior * Child support * Visiting * Ethnic families * Involvement, Despite a growing body of literature, the specific dimensions of nonresident fathers' involvement on child behavior are poorly understood (Amato and Gilbreth 1999; Conner and White 2006; Flouri 2005). Especially [...]

The Forgiveness Intervention Model (Bonach, 2007) is tested as a conceptual framework for former partners who are coparenting. Scores of the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of forgiveness from a sample of 135 separated or divorced parents were analyzed to contribute to the understanding of coparenting quality. Previous literature supported the contribution of certain predictor variables, including blame, offense severity judgments, and control variables including hostile divorce proceedings, satisfaction with child custody financial arrangements, perceived remorsefulness of the former partner, prior conflict, and the mediating role of forgiveness to coparenting quality. In this study separate regression analyses were run for each dimension of forgiveness to determine their role in the relationship between the study variables and coparenting quality. The cognitive dimension more often had the most significant contribution between the variables examined and coparenting quality. Furthermore, higher coparenting quality was significantly correlated with how positively an individual feels (r = .49, p < .001) and thinks about the former partner (r = .50, p < .001). The findings affirm the clinical importance of primary cognitive tasks necessary for an individual to move through the stages of forgiveness to 'move on' and achieve desirable outcomes such as a quality coparenting relationship with a former partner. KEYWORDS forgiveness, coparenting, quality coparenting, separation, divorce, divorce intervention

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.

The study reports on information from 67 court records in one judicial district. These were cases in which child-support decisions were requested for reasons other than divorce, and that often involved a variety of complex family situations. The cases were described by combining genograms with ecomaps and financial information, a method that visually portrays on one page the human, physical, social, and financial resources for children. The patterns across cases underlined the importance of having complete financial information in the court records in order to make support decisions realize the values of accuracy and consistency in decision procedures. KEYWORDS. Child support, family resources, genograms, ecomaps

Family complexity that results when adults have children with multiple partners (multiple-partner fertility) is quite common. It also has important implications for understanding child support outcomes and for designing and evaluating welfare and family policy. Using a unique set of merged administrative data, this article provides the first comprehensive documentation of levels of family complexity among a broad sample of welfare recipients. The analyses suggest that family complexity is very common and also that complexity is associated with systematically different child support outcomes.

This study investigated interaction behaviors associated with young adult children's desire to obtain emotion- and problem-focused support in conversations with their mothers. It also explored the relationship between young adult children's behaviors and mothers' judgments that children wanted each type of support. Approach behaviors in support episodes reflect a distressed individual's willingness to approach the problem and/or feelings about the problem. These include both negatively valenced nonverbal arousal cues and problem- and feeling-related verbal disclosure. Findings provide support for the link between some nonverbal arousal cues and mothers' perceptions that young adult children wanted problem-focused support, but not for the expectation that children's arousal cues would relate to their reported support goals. In contrast, verbal emotion disclosure predicted children's desire to obtain both support types but was unrelated to mothers' judgments. Keywords: Support Seeking; Mother-Young Adult Child Relationships; Verbal Disclosure; Nonverbal Arousal, As a communicative event, the support episode is fraught with risks for both individuals needing and individuals providing support (Goldsmith & Parks, 1990; LaGaipa, 1990). The potential for negative evaluations, [...]

Although a number of current policy initiatives presume that nonresident fathers could provide substantially more income for their (welfare-attached) children, several factors lead to skepticism. This article uses administrative and survey data to describe the characteristics of fathers of welfare recipients. The results suggest that most of these fathers have limited economic resources and, like the mothers of their children, often face substantial barriers to providing for themselves and their families. Balancing the needs and obligations of low-income mothers and fathers is difficult.

As an alternative to litigation, mediation has been used to resolve conflicts in a cooperative manner to reflect the best interest of parties. Utilizing an archival research method, three sources of public statistical records from Central Ohio provided complete information about sociodemographic characteristics, marital and divorce history, spousal cooperation factors, mediation outcomes, and child support for 106 couples. A logistic regression found socioeconomic status, mediation, and suitability for mediation to be associated with child support compliance. KEYWORDS. Mediation, child support, child support compliance, divorce Policy

Research presented focuses on proportion of never married single-mothers receiving child support during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Findings suggest that states that simultaneously increased funding for child support measures and enacted stricter laws for delinquent fathers experienced the greatest increase in single mother families receiving support.

This paper uses a sample of lone mothers (and former lone mothers who are now repartnered) drawn from the 1997 Family Resources Survey to analyse the potential effects of reforming the UK system of child support. The main deficiency of the data is that non-resident fathers cannot be matched to the mothers in the data, and this is overcome by exploiting information from another dataset which gives the joint distribution of the characteristics of separated parents. The effects of reforming the child support system are simulated for the amount of maintenance liabilities, the amount paid and the net incomes of households containing mothers-with-care and of households containing non-resident fathers. The likely effects of the reform are simulated at various levels of compliance. The analysis highlights the need for further research into the incentive effects of child support on individual behaviour.

Child support by the father of children out of wedlock born to disadvantaged teenage mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children is investigated. The research was based on data on the fathers of 6,009 children born to teenage mothers in the inner city areas of Camden, NJ; Newark, NJ; and Chicago, IL, between 1987 and 1989. Results indicate that the majority of the fathers of these children are, on the average, slightly older than the young mothers, have no ongoing contact with their children and provided little support to their children or to the mothers of their children.

Patterns of child support compliance in Wisconsin was established by studying child support cases that came to court from 1986-1988. Results show that support payments are generally stable for the 5-year period, thus nullifying the assumption that child support compliance declines in time. However, a growing polarization of groups of full payers and nonpayers was observed where those involved in divorce cases tend to make full payments, while those with paternity cases generally fail to provide financial support for their children.

State judges in Louisiana were surveyed with regard to their beliefs dealing with custody issues. These issues dealt with the relationships between custody decisions and maternal preference, maternal employment, remarriage, joint custody, sexual misconduct, and payment of child support. There was significant disagreement among judges regarding the impact of maternal employment and prior sexual misconduct on custody decisions. There was substantial agreement on the remainder of the issues. The judges exhibited a strong maternal preference. The majority chose neutral responses with regard to the impact of remarriage. There was opposition to joint physical custody. The majority of the judges were opposed to tying visitation to the payment of child support.

Researchers investigated the viability of relying solely on the resident parent's representation of the nonresident parent's economic links with their child in analyses of child support. Investigation of parents who had been cohabiting couples revealed that there was a statistically insignificant difference between the reporting of the two groups on child support payments. However, investigators should obtain information from either the nonresident parent alone, or both the resident and the nonresident parent, to provide the best understanding of levels of child support.

In a three-stage study, noncustodial parents' psychopathic deviance and alcohol use accounted for significant variance in custodial parents' reports of child support and visitation. In noncustodial parents' reports, compliance with child support, but not frequency of visitation, was related to measures of deviance. Implications for policy, research, and psychoeducational interventions are discussed.

Some 20-35 yr old fathers living without their children hold less wealth than other men, and some own assets in the form of bank accounts, homes and cars. Seven recommendations have been given to improve the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) asset seizure practices. Men who become fathers in their teens gather fewer assets than other men. Most of the nonresidential fathers hold assets by the age of 35 years.

We examine the impacts on child support payments of explicitly indexing orders to noncustodial parents' incomes by expressing orders as a percentage of income rather than as a fixed sum. Using data collected from 21 counties in Wisconsin, we find that payments on behalf of percentage-expressed orders increase much faster than would be expected were orders expressed as a fixed sum, after controlling for differences between cases with the two award types. Collections on behalf of percentage-expressed orders increase relative to fixed-sum orders because of large increases over time in the amount of the obligation; in comparison, fixed-sum obligations are extremely stable., I. Introduction Since the mid-1970s, researchers and policymakers have increasingly focused on the child support system as a means of reducing poverty and welfare dependency among single-mother families. Increased scrutiny [...]

Family assistance helps many teenager or young unmarried mothers to cope with poverty and the challenges of childrearing. Kin support to young mothers, while beneficial, should not be romanticized. It also often entails conflict, stress, frustration, and disappointment due to interpersonal tensions, or conflicting interests, or relatives' limited ability to provide support. Nearly always the underlying issue is a discrepancy between the young mother's expectations and her support network's performance. We describe three sources of unrealistic expectations: relatives' initial reactions to her pregnancy, a history of early childbearing by relatives, and desires for a relationship with baby's father. Key words: childbearing, kinship, social networks, stress, teen mothers; US, California

This paper reports on the design of a study using procedures of modified analytic induction to investigate how courtroom procedures followed or did not follow child support guidelines. Using concepts from principles of procedural fairness and distributive justice, the research team coded transcripts of public hearings on child support guidelines. This paper reports on work in progress and does not report results or conclusions. The coded examples of justice principles demonstrate how procedures of modified analytic induction lead to the refinement of conceptual definitions when tested against lived experiences. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: getinfo@ haworth.com] KEYWORDS. Child support, Distributive justice, Induction, Congruence, Qualitative research, Hermeneutics

Extant literature on the impact of prenatal drug exposure is reviewed and the application of this body of knowledge to foster children is analyzed. An early intervention pilot project in foster care program in New York City is also described. This program found similar percentage of developmental delays, a little over 40%, in children in both the with- and without-exposure groups. The implications of such findings are discussed.

Objective. Children born out of wedlock receive very little child support; one reason given is that their fathers have low incomes. This research has three purposes: to examine the incomes of these fathers at the time paternity is established; to explore whether these incomes increase over time; and to examine whether the increases in income translate into changes in child support awards. Methods. This research uses descriptive analysis and multivariate regression on data from Wisconsin court, tax, and AFDC records. Results. Although many fathers of children born out of wedlock have zero or very low incomes at the time the paternity case comes to court in Wisconsin, half of the fathers age 25 and older who have incomes in the court records have incomes over $10,000/year. Further, the incomes of many inrease modestly or dramatically in the next three years, with the youngest fathers showing the largest increases. No relationship is found between changes in fathers' incomes and changes in the amounts of child support awards. Conclusions. The author concludes that the incomes of paternity fathers (especially young fathers) should be monitored regularly and that changes in income should result in changes in child support awards.

I. Introduction In a recent issue of this Journal, Philip Robins Robins 1992 and in an earlier working paper, Robins 1989) addresses the following important policy question. why, despite increasing [...]

A study was conducted on shifts in the influence of child support on children's educational attainment in the US. Data from the 1979-1988 Current Population Survey March/April files were analyzed. Results indicated that the effect of child support on children's education may have slumped due to the introduction of more reluctant payers into the child support system via stricter enforcement. Results suggest that child support represents hidden areas of the father-child relationship which are not as ideal among reluctant payers as among their voluntary counterparts.

1. Introduction The number of lone parents has risen very rapidly in the United Kingdom in recent years. In 1991 there were estimated to be 1.30 million lone parents representing [...]

This article explores the relationship of child support awards to earnings of divorced noncustodial fathers. States have adopted child support award standards that vary in how noncustodial parent income is used in computing the amount of support owed. Most standards use income at the time of the award to set the award as a fixed-dollar amount. A few awards are set as a fixed percentage, so the dollar amount owed depends on income in each period. Economic theory suggests that fathers would increase their market work (and therefore their earnings) in response to a fixed-dollar amount award but that the effect of a fixed-percentage award is ambiguous. Fathers' reactions to child support are important because they affect how much support could be collected and the economic efficiency of awards. Data collected in 21 Wisconsin counties for 1981-89 suggest that the type and level of child support awards did not significantly affect fathers' earnings in the first few years after the award.

In this article, we examine the determinants of child support compliance in nonmarital child support cases in Wisconsin by focusing on the father's ability to pay and the stringency of the child support enforcement system. We find that tougher enforcement rules positively affect compliance rates. Higher incomes are associated with higher compliance rates, and lower incomes, with lower rates. The percentage of income that is owed in child support also has an effect on compliance. Orders that represent a high percentage of income relative to existing guidelines are associated with lower compliance rates. However, owing a low percentage of income only has an effect on compliance for fathers with very low incomes; for these fathers, obligating them to pay low amounts of support positively affects compliance. These results suggest that a father's ability to pay, in addition to his willingness to pay, determines the extent to which he fulfills his child support obligation. We conclude that to increase child support collections, both the earning power of noncustodial parents and the stringency of the enforcement system should be increased.

Stepfamily adjustment was studied for the influence of payment or receipt of child support in an attempt to find if remarriage altered these payments, to explore the kind of alteration and to identify other factors linked to child support compliance. Receivers reported receiving less and payers reported paying more child support, among those who reported alterations in child support. Those whose exposure was noncompliant, and those who received child support, were differentiated by very few variables. Stepfamily adjustment is not greatly affected by child support.

Established studies made on the relationship between visitation and child support show that the 2 are interrelated and that fathers would make more timely child support payments if visitation rights were granted on a regular basis. The study utilises longitudinal data from mothers left in charge of the childrem and absent fathers. Results show that there is no interrelationahip between child support and visitation rights and that previous studies failed to take unmeasured characteristics into account.

A study on income growth among nonresident fathers who were either divorced or unmarried was conducted on Wisconsin nonresident fathers using data from the Wisconsin Court Record and the Wisconsin Dept of Revenue. Results indicate that their income, which are initially very low, increases dramatically over the years after paternity establishment. Thus, nonmarital fathers have no excuse to avoid child support inspite of their low income.

In this article, we report the results of microsimulations using data from the 1986 Current Population Survey--Child Support Supplement (CPS-CSS). The results show that strengthening private child support enforcement and implementing an assured child support benefit would increase the amount of money going to black, Hispanic, and white custodial families. Enforcement alone redistributes income away from the entire minority community (noncustodial parents, custodial parents, and taxpayers), whereas the assured benefit has the opposite effect.

Information obtained from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) core and its child support, marital history and other modules will provide an understanding of the apparent inability of the federal and state Child Support Enforcement programs to make headway against the growing problem of absent fathers. SIPP has been useful in numerous decisions concerning child support policy. It supplies information on the relation of participation in programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the payment of child support.

The articles in the special issue on Families, Poverty, and Public Policies focus on poor families with children and develop a central theme: that current policies are not sufficiently responsive to the emerging reality of large numbers of children living in poverty. This article first provides a context for considering the results reported in these articles by noting recent public policy, demographic, and socioeconomic trends that will influence these families in the future. Second, the articles are briefly reviewed and compared with an emphasis on demonstrating the need for diversity in programs to respond to the diverse needs of these families. Third, a research agenda related to the articles is discussed. The conclusion of the article addresses the role of research in the policy process.

Beyond the payment of child support, relatively little is known about the nature and extent of contributions of divorced father to their children. Using nationally representative data data from a sample of ever-divorced women taken from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, the nature and extent of various forms of assistance (in eight areas) provided by divorced fathers are examined. The majority of fathers seldom or never make contributions to their children. Fathers who do contribute to their children have more economic resources and enjoy better relationships with the custodial mother. In addition, there is little support for the notion that fathers substitute other forms of assistance for payment of child support. Rather, other forms of support are provided in addition to making child-support payments.