A National Profile of Nonresident Fathers and Their Ability to Pay Child Support

Abstract

This study provides the first national estimates of nonresident fathers' income and child support payments as reported by nonresident fathers, themselves, in two nationally representative surveys. According to these data, nonresident fathers could pay as much as $34 billion more in child support if all nonresident fathers had child support orders and if those orders were fully paid. This figure has been cited extensively by President Bill Clinton and other policymakers as justification for strengthening the enforcement of child support. The article explains how this figure was derived and provides a national profile of nonresident fathers and their ability to pay child support. Key Words: child support, fathers, nonresident parents. In the popular press, nonresident fathers are typically depicted as deadbeat dads who can afford to pay child support but choose not to, denying their children needed income. Previous research has certainly confirmed that such men exist, but it also has shown that many nonresident fathers are poor and lack the ability to pay child support. To date, we have not had a national profile of nonresident fathers to ascertain exactly how many of them are able to pay child support but choose not to and how many are already poor. This lack of information is due, in part, to the fact that large national surveys typically do not ask men about their children who live elsewhere. Moreover, nonresident fathers are seriously underrepresented in the national surveys that have asked about these children. This study uses two surveys-the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) and the 1990 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)-to understand who nonresident fathers are and how much child support they could afford to pay. I begin by explaining how I identify nonresident fathers in these surveys and by measuring the extent to which nonresident fathers are underrepresented. (The Appendix gives more details on identifying nonresident fathers.) I then develop a method of reweighting the data to take into account nonresident fathers' underrepresentation in these surveys. Once the data are reweighted, I provide a demographic and economic profile of nonresident fathers who self-report in the surveys, as well as all nonresident fathers, including those who are missed by these surveys. I contrast the characteristics of nonresident fathers with those of custodial mothers and resident fathers. I end by estimating how much more child support nonresident fathers could potentially pay. PREVIOUS RESEARCH Previous efforts to measure the ability of nonresident fathers to pay child support have met with serious data problems. First, most large, nationally representative surveys do not ask men whether they are nonresident fathers. Surveys that have asked this question have drawn exceedingly low response rates, including those collected in the 1979 Current Population Survey and the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households (Cherlin, Griffith, & McCarthy, 1983; Seltzer & Brandreth, 1994). These studies find about 60% as many nonresident fathers as custodial mothers. In an effort to overcome the lack of national data on nonresident fathers, Garfinkel and Oellerich (1989) developed an indirect method of determining nonresident fathers' income that was based on the characteristics of custodial mothers. Many studies have used this approach to examine nonresident fathers' ability to pay child support (e.g., Garfinkel, 1992; Garfinkel & Oellerich, 1989; Meyer, Garfinkel, Oellerich, & Robins, 1992). These studies conclude that nonresident fathers could pay considerably more child support, but the findings are not based on direct evidence of nonresident fathers and their actual income. Furthermore, this method cannot be used to determine other characteristics of nonresident fathers, such as their behavior in the labor force, their marital status, and living arrangements. …