Mothers' Reports of Nonresident Fathers' Involvement With Their Children: Revisiting the Relationship Between Child Support Payment and Visitation

Nonresident fathers' financial support and time are both important to children's well-being, although the association between these two types of involvement is mixed in the literature. Using the 1994 - 2004 waves of the Current Population Survey-Child Support Supplement, this article examined the associations between mothers' reports of child support payments and visitation. The results indicated that about 36% of nonresident fathers did not visit their children at all, and the distribution of visitation was highly skewed. Therefore, zero-inflated Poisson regression was used, and the results indicated that the amount of child support payments was positively associated with the onset but not the frequency of visitation. Policy and research implications are discussed.