Fathering Across Households

Lindsay M. Monte , U.S. Census Bureau

The complexity of men’s paternity can be seen in the intersection of several different statistics. For example, roughly a quarter of all fathers of minor children do not live with at least some of those children, probably in part because 14.6 percent of fathers have children with more than one woman. However, even in the absence of multiple partner fertility, few men have sole custody following a divorce. These data suggest that, for many men, fathering extends beyond a single home, and may include a diversity of parenting arrangements and situations. In this paper, I use a large, nationally representative dataset with extensive measures of household and familial complexity to examine men’s fathering of minor children, particularly in the context of non-nuclear families.

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 Presented in Session 154. Family Complexity and Diversity