The purpose of this study was to establish how involvement by a
nonresident father—as measured through visitation and the payment
of child support—affects the ability of the child’s resident family to
meet its food needs. In 2004, over 6 million children who resided with a
single mother and had a father who lived elsewhere were food insecure.
That is, these children did not always have access to enough food for
active, healthy living because their household lacked money or other
resources for food. About 1 in 10 (11.9 percent) of all U.S. households are
food insecure. Access to food is a concern particularly for low-income
single mothers with children; nearly half (48 percent) of them are food insecure.
Even after the effects of income are accounted for, single mothers with
children are more likely to be food insecure than married couples or single
fathers with children.
As child support enforcement becomes more rigorous, it is important and
timely to investigate how nonresidential parental involvement, which is
encouraged by current policy affects food security. USDA offers a number
of food and nutrition assistance programs, with the Food Stamp Program
(FSP) serving as the first line of defense against hunger for low-income
families. As such, it is the most researched of the programs. Yet, to date, no
research has tested the effect of nonresident father involvement (child
support and visitation) on FSP participation and food security.
The specific aim of this research was to establish the effects of involvement
by fathers on food security. Multivariate analyses were employed to understand
how the amount of child support received, the frequency and duration
of a father’s visits, and other important factors affect the likelihood that the
child’s resident family is food secure.
The analysis was based on the 1997 round of the National Survey of
America’s Families (NSAF). Designed to study the devolution of responsibility
for social programs from the Federal Government to the States, the
survey is representative of the noninstitutionalized, civilian population of
people under age 65 in the Nation. The NSAF provides a range of information
on the economic, health, and social characteristics of children, adults,
and their families and contains information on over 44,000 households and
34,439 children. The NSAF has several strengths that make it ideal for
carrying out this investigation. First, it contains a very large number of children
living apart from their biological father, roughly 10,000. Second, the
NSAF contains an oversample of disadvantaged families with incomes
below 200 percent of the Federal poverty level, a group that is more likely
to be food insecure. Third, the NSAF includes questions related to food
insecurity and information about children’s social and financial involvement
with nonresident parents. With few exceptions, this combination of variables
is not found in recent nationally representative samples of U.S. families
with children.
All analyses are in reference to low-income children and their families. The
analytic sample is comprised of 7,861 focal children ages 0-17 who live
with their biological (or adopted) mother and whose biological (or adopted)
father is absent from the home. Additionally, the study sample is limited to
families with incomes below 200 percent of poverty, which is slightly above
the level necessary to qualify for most food assistance programs.
The NSAF food insecurity questions focus on the respondent’s and their
family’s food situation over the last 12 months. Questions include
(1) worrying whether food would run out before getting money to buy
more, (2) food not lasting and not having money to get any more, and
(3) adults in the family ever cutting the size of meals or skipping meals
because they did not have enough money for food, and the frequency with
which this happened. First, the study treats each response as an independent
indicator of food insecurity and measures frequency dichotomously (ever
true or ever happened versus never true or never happened). The study also
assesses the severity of food insecurity by using three indicators to create
three new dichotomous variables: (1) ever experienced at least one of the
above aspects of food insecurity, (2) ever experienced at least two of the
above aspects of food insecurity, and (3) ever experienced all three food
insecurity indicators.
The study estimates a probit model of the form:
FOODINS = αFI + βX1 + μ
where FOODINS is an indicator of whether the household experienced this
aspect of food insecurity (=1) or not (=0). Experiencing an aspect of food
insecurity is a function of father involvement (vector FI) as measured
through child visitation and the payment of child support. X is a vector of
other explanatory variables, and μ is an error term.
The characteristics of the analytic sample reflect our focus on families
with incomes below 200 percent of poverty. A majority of these families
have problems meeting their food needs. For example, 57 percent reported
that, in the last 12 months, they worried that their food would run out before
getting money to buy more. One-half of the families experienced an instance
where their food did not last and they did not have money to get more, while
one in three (32 percent) households reported that adults had to cut the size
of their meals or skip meals because they did not have enough food. Overall,
nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of the families in the sample experienced at
least one of these three food problems in the previous year, one-half (49
percent) experienced at least two of these food problems in the previous
year, and one-quarter (26 percent) experienced all three of these problems.
Study results show that frequent—more than once a week—visits by the
father reduce the likelihood that the focal child’s resident family will
experience episodes of food insecurity. This result is robust in that it is
found for each of the three separate food insecurity measures and for the
severity measures. Furthermore, while any amount of visiting is typically
found to be negatively related to aspects of food insecurity, the relationship
is statistically significant only for visiting more than once a week, the most
frequent level of visitation measured.
Receiving child support does not have the same consistent significantly
negative effect on food insecurity that visits by the father do. With
respect to each individual indicator of food insecurity, receiving child
support reduces only the likelihood that the adults in the resident family’s
household ever had to cut the size of their meals or had to skip meals. Only
this relationship is statistically significant. The study hypothesizes that the
small amount of child support received by families who receive it are not
sufficient or consistent enough to affect their ability to access an adequate
amount of food regularly. Even with additional child support income, these
low-income families continue to worry about having enough food and to
experience times when they do not have enough food for everyone to eat.