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Objective: This paper examines the determinants of father-child contact in Germany after divorce and separation, with a special emphasis on the role of legal child support.
Background: The contact separated fathers have with their children is a policy-relevant issue that has been intensively addressed in previous research for the US, the UK, and Canada. For continental Europe, there has been far less research on this topic. This paper investigated how fathers’ union status at childbirth, custody arrangements, and past and present partnership dynamics affect the level of contact they had with their first-born child from a prior union.
Method: Data were used from wave 2 (2009/10) to wave 8 (2015/16) of the German family panel pairfam (www.pairfam.de). With a final sample size of 285 fathers, population average logistic models were estimated that examined non-resident fathers’ probability of having frequent contact versus having little or no contact with their first-born children.
Results: Whether a non-resident father shared legal custody with the mother or not was a decisive factor in whether he had regular contact with his minor child, particularly if he was not living with the mother of the child at the time of delivery. There were strong interaction effects between having joint legal custody and the time since the parental separation. Joint legal custody did not have an immediate impact on father-child contact around the time of separation, but as time elapsed, men without joint legal custody were more likely to lose contact with their children than men with joint legal custody.
Conclusion: Joint legal custody may provide an institutional arrangement for separated parents to exercise their responsibility for the well-being of their children and thus be conducive to regular father-child contact.
Trennungen und Scheidungen auf einem hohen Niveau – auch unter Familien mit minderjährigen Kindern – kennzeichnen bereits seit längerer Zeit die Familienentwicklung in Deutschland und anderen europäischen Ländern. Sofern aus einer Beziehung gemeinsame Kinder hervorgegangen sind, impliziert eine Trennung zwar das Ende der Partnerschaft, jedoch nicht das Ende der Elternschaft. Sowohl auf gesellschaftlicher als auch auf individueller Ebene besteht, mit Ausnahme von Sondersituationen, mittlerweile die explizite Erwartung, dass Eltern nach einer Trennung in ökonomischer und sozialer Hinsicht weiterhin gemeinsam Verantwortung für ihre Kinder wahrnehmen. In der gesetzlichen Grundlage wird allerdings weiterhin davon ausgegangen, dass Kinder nach der Trennung bei nur einem Elternteil leben. Für andere Modelle existieren bisher keine oder nur unzureichende Regelungen. Die ökonomischen, sozialen und psychischen Folgen einer Trennung oder Scheidung können nach Geschlecht, sozialer Position und Alter variieren und damit soziale Ungleichheit hervorrufen oder verstärken. Neue Partnerschaften bzw. sogenannte Fortsetzungsfamilien beeinflussen das Leben der betroffenen Erwachsenen und Kinder zusätzlich. Bislang existieren über die Verbreitung und Lebensumstände von Nachtrennungsfamilien in Deutschland nur rudimentäre sozialwissenschaftliche Befunde. Die vorliegende Broschüre stellt einen ersten Versuch dar, bislang vorliegende sozialwissenschaftliche Befunde zur Lebenswirklichkeit von Nachtrennungsfamilien in Deutschland allgemeinverständlich in knapper Form zu bilanzieren. Folgende thematische Schwerpunkte werden behandelt: 1) Allgemeine Trends und rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen, 2) Elternschaft und Partnerschaft nach Trennung und Scheidung, 3) Wohlbefinden und Lebenszufriedenheit nach Trennung und Scheidung sowie 4) Finanzielle Folgen von Trennung und Scheidung. Diese Aspekte werden aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven beleuchtet und zugrundeliegende empirische Analysen decken ein breites Spektrum der derzeit verfügbaren Datenquellen ab.
A large body of literature has examined how separation and divorce influence social and economic well-being. One consistent finding of the literature is that women and men are affected differently by divorce and separation. Women, and particularly mothers, are likely to suffer from a loss of income. Fathers frequently suffer from having reduced contact with their children, who usually continue to live with their mother after a union dissolution. This chapter uses 10 years of data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) to examine more closely the gender differences in life satisfaction after separation. In line with previous research, we show that following a separation, satisfaction with family life declines more among fathers than among mothers, and that mothers tend to experience a greater decline in their satisfaction with their financial situation than fathers. We also examine the role of shared parenting (Wechselmodell) in parents’ life satisfaction. Our findings indicate that shared parenting is positively associated with well-being, but also that the association is not stable to the inclusion of socio-economic characteristics that explain the selection into shared parenting. The results are discussed in the context of the current German policy debate on shared parenting.