Child support payments don’t contribute to children’s well-being; fatherless children tend to be obese

Professor Kari Adamsons of the University of Connecticut spoke about her research at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.

What is American society getting from the roughly 3 percent of GDP that we spend making sure that alimony and child support cashflows are established and maintained? Professor Adamsons says that research psychologists can’t find any effect on American children’s well-being whether or not child support was being paid from one parent to the other.

Part of this may be due to the fact that adults who receive child support cash often respond by cutting their working hours and therefore the net spending power within the winner parent’s household may not change much.

Adamsons, however, described big differences in child-support/well-being correlation based on the race of the mother. For “non-white mothers” (Rachel Dolezal qualifies?), when child support was paid there was a negative effect on the children’s well-being. This is consistent with previous research, to the extent that “low-income” in the U.S. tends to overlap with “non-white,” e.g., see the Children, Mothers and Fathers chapter:

“Child Support and Young Children’s Development” (Nepomnyaschy, et al, 2012; Social Science Review 86:1), a Rutgers and University of Wisconsin study of children of lower income unmarried parents, found that any kind of court involvement was associated with harm to children: “We also find that provision of formal [court-ordered] child support is associated with worse withdrawn and aggressive behaviors.” The authors found that informal (voluntary) support from fathers could be helpful to children living with single mothers but court-ordered support, even when the cash was actually transferred, was on balance harmful.

It turns out that contact with the father was also a negative for well-being when the mother was non-white. Certainly Adamsons wouldn’t have suggested this, given that even tenure has its limits, but it seems that if what society cares about is child well-being and we accept that courts must deal with children on a rushed wholesale basis, the laws and defaults should be different depending on the race of the litigants(!).

Somewhat separately, Adamsons talked about what research psychologists have found regarding the effects of losing a father. Why are we always in the running for World’s Fattest Nation? Could that be related to the fact that we have the largest percentage of children without two parents (stats)? Adamsons said that “fathers have a strong and unique [not replaceable by another adult, such as the mother] influence on obesity.” What about the fact that courts usually assign a father to at least an every-other-weekend babysitting role? “That kind of parental involvement is probably not helpful. It isn’t normal. When they’re visiting with the father, the kids are waiting to go home to the mother.”