Continued growth in the proportion of U.S. children who live in single-mother households motivates attempts to alleviate the economic and social disadvantages of separation. We examine important aspects of family life after separation: legal and physical custody arrangements, child support awards and payments, visits between parents and children who live apart, and parental conflict. Understanding family relationships after separation is essential for anticipating the effects of recent policies, such as the child support reforms in the Family Support Act of 1988 and widespread adoption of joint custody laws. Using new national longitudinal data, we assess continuity in parent-child and parent-parent relationships before and after divorce. We complement this by analyzing cross-sectional data with statistical models that explicitly take into account that parents' expectations about child support after divorce inform their custody decisions. We examine changes over time in child support and co-parenting relationships for a representative sample of separated parents interviewed at two times. We compare experiences of children born in and outside of marriage. We investigate alternative explanations for the relationship between paying support and visiting. We use new data from Wisconsin to model compliance with support awards, using direct measures of parents' experiences with child support reforms at an earlier time (e.g., routine withholding of child support and use of a guideline to set awards). Analyses control for socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, as well as intervening variables such as parental conflict and attitudes about the child support system measured prior to compliance. We exploit unique data to model participation in child support surveys and to describe response errors in measures of key constructs: support awards, payments, and where children live.
| Seltzer, J A (1998) Father by law: effects of joint legal custody on nonresident fathers' involvement with children. Demography 35:135-46 |
