Keeping Divorced Dads Involved Benefits Kids
Custodial parents listen up: The more involvement a noncustodial parent has with his or her children, the greater the financial support he or she will be willing to contribute. That is the finding of recent companion studies by ASU psychology professors Sanford Braver and William Fabricius.
Fabricius studied 820 college-aged adults from divorced families. He found that 70 percent believe that equal residential time shared between parents is best for children, but living arrangements after divorce generally give less time with the noncustodial parent, who is often the father.
Braver’s and Fabricius’ separate joint study examined current state laws allowing for court-ordered financial support for college-aged children of divorced parents. After surveying 368 ASU college students whose parents divorced while growing up, Braver and Fabricius found that most fathers (63 percent) voluntarily paid more than what the court was likely to order. The amount they paid directly coincided with the degree to which they felt “parentally enfranchised.”
Braver takes exception with divorce researcher Judith Wallerstein’s 1998 study findings that advocate for states to legislate court-ordered college support.
Wallerstein says that the legislation is necessary and urgently needed because “without coercion, not one of the fathers in [her] 26-person sample fully supported their children’s college expenses.”
“We found that after equating for any disparities in income between parents, divorced fathers pay nearly the same amount of college support as mothers,” Braver says.
“More importantly, our investigation revealed there are factors that impelled divorced fathers to voluntarily support their children in college,” he explains. “In contrast to Wallerstein’s sample, about half of the current sample’s parents had joint legal custody. Fathers so endowed paid significantly more than the mothers did in either custody arrangement, and more than fathers without custody. The more the mother wanted the father to be part of a child’s life, the more financial support he offered to the child,” Braver says.
Nationwide, 21 states and the District of Columbia by law allow family courts to order mandatory college support from noncustodial parents. However, the ASU researchers told divorce court officials those laws are not equitable because no state can order such support from the custodial parent or from non-divorced parents.
Fabricius’ study results indicated that adults who were children of divorced parents wanted to have more time with their noncustodial fathers as they were growing up. They believed equal time with each parent was best. The study showed the living arrangements they had as children offered them little time with the noncustodial parent.
Of the participants, 57 percent said that their father had wanted more time with them, but that their mother limited that contact. Only about 10 percent of the sample grew up spending equal time with each parent.
“Statistics that show divorced fathers spend little time with their children may be accurate, but they do not tell us that this is necessarily what fathers want,” Fabricius says. “Some fathers may want little time, but others—44 percent in this study—wanted to take equal responsibility for child rearing but were prevented by circumstances from doing so.”
Fabricius says that children’s wishes should be taken into consideration when deciding living arrangements. Equal time with each parent creates an equitable living arrangement in which parents do not see the custody issue as a win or lose situation for themselves.--Lynette Summerill
For more information, contact Sanford L. Braver, Ph.D., (480) 965-5405, or William V. Fabricius, Ph.D., (480) 965-9372, Department of Psychology. Send e-mail to Sanford.Braver@asu.edu, or to William.Fabricius@asu.edu
Publication date: August 2000
ASU Research Magazine
URL: http://researchmag.asu.edu/stories/divorce.html
