Fathers’ Socioeconomic Precarity and Mothers’ Ability to Make Ends Meet

THE IMPORTANCE OF NONRESIDENT FATHER SUPPORT AS A SURVIVAL STRATEGY FOR SINGLE MOTHERS

Making Ends Meet identified a set of survival strategies that mothers employed to patch together the resources needed to keep their households afloat prior to welfare reform, including work, cash welfare, network-based strategies (that is, family, friends, romantic partners, and nonresident fathers), support from agencies or community organizations, and other public benefits programs. As other studies in this issue illustrate (Bruch et al. 2026; Pilkauskas and Bruey 2026, this issue; Ananat et al. 2026; van der Naald et al. 2026; Fong and McCarthy 2026; Abbott et al. 2026), policy changes in the last thirty years have fundamentally altered the survival strategies available to mothers. Most notable of these changes was the passage of PRWORA in 1996, which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and essentially removed cash welfare from the suite of tools available to single mothers (Pilkauskas and Bruey 2026, this issue; Bruch et al. 2026). Only twenty-one out of every one hundred families in poverty received TANF cash assistance in 2020, with tremendous variation by state (for example, from 71 percent in California and Vermont to 4 percent in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), compared to sixty-eight out of one hundred families in 1996 (Shrivastava and Azito Thompson 2022). Underscoring the seriousness of these changes, H. Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin (2013) found a large increase in extreme poverty in the years following the passage of PRWORA among mothers “disconnected” from both work and cash welfare.

The post-PRWORA public safety net, with time limited cash welfare and work requirements for many programs, also made mothers more reliant on private and network-based survival strategies (van der Naald et al. 2026; Kwon et al. 2026; Pilkauskas and Bruey 2026, this issue; Ananat et al. 2026). Using network-based resources ranked highly in the moral hierarchy of survival strategies among the mothers in Making Ends Meet, but strategies like “doubling-up” could also increase risk of abuse (Edin and Shaefer 2015; Edin and Lein 1997). Thus, while resources from private networks were an important source of support, this carried risks and was understood to be supplemental to cash welfare or work-based strategies.

Large-scale changes to the child support enforcement (CSE) system in the decades since Making Ends Meet sought to increase formal contributions from fathers, both lending the force of the state to mothers’ claim to economic support from nonresident fathers and further shifting responsibility to private support. Originally created in 1975 to recoup the cost of cash welfare paid to custodial mothers, CSE has evolved into an extensive system of policies and practices to establish legal paternity and child support orders and enforce collections (Tollestrup 2021). Consistent with the mantra of “personal responsibility,” extensive state investment in the CSE system began in earnest just after the enactment of welfare reform in PRWORA even as enrollment in public benefits declined and program generosity largely stagnated (Bruch et al. 2026). Most families in the CSE system are required to participate as a condition of custodial mothers’ receipt of public benefits (Selekman and Holcomb 2018), not because of parental preference for state involvement (Waller 2019; Rambert 2021). This means that while some mothers intentionally seek out involvement with CSE to secure resources to support their families, most do not engage voluntarily with the system and many do not participate at all. Indeed, only half of custodial mothers have a formal child support agreement (Grall 2020). Despite state efforts to enforce collections from fathers, less than one-third of children with a nonresident parent receive any formal child support (Grall 2020), a lower share than before welfare reform; this decline is the result of fewer child support orders being established, especially orders with any support due (Grall 2002; Pilarz and Cuesta 2025; Cancian et al. 2023).

The amount of formal child support due is typically set by the state, withheld from fathers’ paychecks (Office of Child Support Enforcement 2023), and then distributed to mothers or kept as repayment for benefits the mother has received. All but two states retain payments if mothers received TANF, either currently or in the past, though half pass through a small part of those funds to custodial parents (National Conference of State Legislatures 2023). Mothers who receive child support get direct cash payments, which affords them the freedom to use the funds as they deem necessary. While formal child support receipt has been shown to increase the regularity of low-income mothers’ total income and to reduce poverty and material hardship in children’s households (Ha et al. 2011; Cuesta and Meyer 2018; Nepomnyaschy et al. 2022), recent evidence suggests that only a small and select group of mothers receiving the highest amounts of formal cash support actually see a reduction in poverty or material hardship (Nepomnyaschy et al. 2022). Indeed, the large investment in CSE in recent decades has not resulted in substantial increases to either the proportion of mothers receiving any support or the amount of support received (Pilarz and Cuesta 2025; Cancian et al. 2025).

A large share of the monetary support mothers receive from their personal networks comes from the fathers of their children outside of the formal CSE system, primarily as direct cash and noncash contributions. In-kind (noncash) contributions such as toys, clothes, food, medicine, and paying directly for child care, after-school, or other enrichment programs are common, with nearly 60 percent of custodial mothers receiving such support according to national data (Grall 2020; Sorensen 2021). Importantly, in-kind support also carries more emotional and symbolic value because it signals fathers’ commitment, connection, time with children, and cooperation with their children’s mothers (Waller et al. 2018; Craigie 2012; Waller 2002). Fathers are more likely to provide this voluntary support (Nepomnyaschy et al. 2020; Kane et al. 2015), and it may be of greater financial value than formal child support (Kane et al. 2015) as it cannot be intercepted by the state. In-kind support is also provided more consistently over the child’s life (Sariscsany et al. 2019; Nepomnyaschy and Garfinkel 2010), making it particularly beneficial for mothers’ allocation of household resources and financial planning (Flanagan and Halpern-Meekin 2026, this issue). Evidence from the Future of Families Study shows that in-kind support is associated with improved behavioral and academic outcomes for children (Miller et al. 2020; Nepomnyaschy et al. 2020) and reduced material hardship in their households, especially when nonresident fathers are involved in their children’s lives (Nepomnyaschy and Garfinkel 2011, 2014; Nepomnyaschy et al. 2022). Thus, the importance of nonresident fathers’ voluntary support as a survival strategy for mothers spans the pre- and post-welfare reform eras.

Although not an explicit focus of Making Ends Meet, nonresident fathers’ positive coparenting, engagement, and time spent with children, as well as fathers’ emotional and physical well-being, may also have implications for single mothers’ economic precarity. Recent work indicates that fathers’ engagement is associated with better child outcomes and improved economic standing of mothers’ households, as well as reductions in socioeconomic disparities in child outcomes (Nepomnyaschy et al. 2020, 2022; Miller et al. 2020). Fathers’ time spent with children is highly correlated with their provision of informal and in-kind support, as they often purchase or bring things to children when they visit or spend time with them (Nepomnyaschy 2007; Waller et al. 2018). Further, fathers’ time with children may reduce stress and provide mothers with time for other needed tasks.

FATHERS’ SOCIOECONOMIC PRECARITY

Prior to welfare reform, Edin and Lein (1997, 167) observed: “As important as these contributions were to mothers’ budgets, most mothers knew that they could not count on fathers over the long term because fathers’ incomes were too precarious,” echoing Carol B. Stack’s (1975) assessment of the “reliability” of support from fathers in the early 1970s. Changes to public policy and the economy already underway in the 1990s, including the loss of manufacturing jobs, decline in union power, relocation of remaining work to less accessible areas, and declining real value of the minimum wage, further undermined the wages and employment of economically vulnerable men (Autor et al. 2016; Sugie and Lens 2017; Verick 2009; Wilson 1997). This is particularly true for the population of socioeconomically marginalized men most likely to be nonresident fathers (Berger and Langton 2011). As a result of these changes, fathers’ ability to support their children has eroded rather than expanded to meet mothers’ changing needs. Thus, while men are generally understood to be better off economically than women—even among those at the lowest end of the economic spectrum (Chun-Hoon 2023)—the deteriorated position of men with low socioeconomic status (low-SES) means that nonresident fathers may need to prioritize their own needs over supporting family members in other households. Coupled with the fact that they are often ineligible for more generous benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) if they are able-bodied and have no other dependents, nonresident fathers may have very limited resources to mitigate hardship faced by mothers struggling to make ends meet post-PRWORA.

This deterioration is evident across multiple metrics. Continuing a decades-long slide, the labor force participation rate of men declined from 75 percent in 1997 to 68.9 percent in early 2020 (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024). Likewise, rates of participation in the labor force among prime-age men (ages twenty-five to fifty-four) have decreased with each successive recent generation (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024; Binder and Bound 2019). Except for those at the highest end of the distribution, earnings for prime-age men have also declined or remained stagnant in the decades since welfare reform (England et al. 2020), and wage stagnation has been worst for men of color with the lowest earnings, compounding long-standing racial disparities (Wilson and Rogers 2016). These data reflect, in part, large-scale macroeconomic shifts that have contributed to the increasing precarity of men without a college degree, 64 percent of all men over age twenty-five in the United States (United States Census Bureau 2023). Following all but the most recent economic recession, as industries traditionally dominated by women were among the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2024), the return to employment has been slower for men than women following downturns (Sahin et al. 2010), with some evidence that nonresident fathers are hardest hit (Mincy et al. 2015). The jobs that remain available to such fathers frequently pay little while requiring irregular and nonstandard schedules, two features that make balancing family needs difficult and undermine well-being (Ananat and Gassman-Pines 2021; Schneider and Harknett 2019).

These downward trends in economic stability have occurred alongside the expansion of the CSE system, often compounding fathers’ precarity. Both the public and policymakers expect fathers to support their children, and fathers unable to meet their obligations have been pilloried as “deadbeats,” driving the expansion of CSE (Mincy and Sorensen 1998; Rambert 2021). At the same time, enforcement measures have become increasingly punitive and focused on fathers’ apparent willingness to pay while ignoring their ability to pay. Because orders often include retroactive support, such as the repayment of birthing costs covered by Medicaid, fathers can immediately find themselves in substantial child support debt when an order is established. It has also been common practice, when fathers are not present at hearings or information is missing, for courts to impute their income in setting a child support order (Turetsky 2019), a practice that frequently overestimates the amount that fathers can contribute (Plotnick and Kennedy 2018). Similarly, not all states require the use of self-support reserves, which stipulate that child support orders include a set-aside that allows fathers to retain some income for basic sustenance, and reserves are not always implemented in states that require them (National Conference of State Legislatures 2020).

These practices have resulted in child support obligations that are beyond the means of many fathers, and falling behind on required payments can lead to serious penalties, including court-ordered reductions in time with children, driver’s license suspension, interception of tax returns, criminal charges, and incarceration (Haney 2018, 2022; Sorensen et al. 2007; Tollestrup 2021; National Conference of State Legislatures 2021; Rambert 2021). Compounding the challenges of unrealistic orders, thirty-four states charge interest on child support arrears, with rates as high as 12 percent (National Conference of State Legislatures 2021). As a result of all of these CSE practices, fathers are much more likely than in prior decades to incur unmanageable child support arrears (Turetsky and Waller 2020), with 77 percent of nonresident parents in the child support system today carrying arrears (Office of Child Support Enforcement 2021) and only 40 percent of those arrears likely to be collected (Sorensen et al. 2007). Most of these arrears are owed by men making less than $10,000 a year, and this debt is associated with a host of negative outcomes for men and their families (Miller and Mincy 2012; Nepomnyaschy et al. 2021; Robbins et al. 2022; Turner and Waller 2017; Sorensen et al. 2007; Rambert 2021).

The reach and punitiveness of the criminal legal system also grew in parallel with the expansion of CSE. The 1990s were an era of “tough on crime” laws that accelerated the growth of this system (Enns 2014) until 2009, when a peak of 7.2 million people, most of whom were parents, were incarcerated or under criminal justice supervision (Glaze 2010; Glaze and Maruschak 2010). As a result, even those with nonviolent and low-level offenses found themselves coping with crippling levels of legal debt (Bing et al. 2022; Friedman and Pattillo 2019; Harris et al. 2022), and more extensive and extended periods of supervision (King 2019). This dramatic expansion in the criminal legal system disproportionately impacted Black and Latino men with less than a high school degree and those from disadvantaged communities (The Pew Charitable Trusts 2010; Kurlychek and Johnson 2019). Both the loss of income during supervision and the collateral consequences of these criminal legal entanglements directly undermine nonresident fathers’ ability to support their children, and child support arrears can grow during this time. Interactions between labor markets and both the criminal legal and CSE systems trap men in ongoing cycles of unemployment, incarceration, and debt, which significantly limit their economic stability (Agan and Makowsky 2018; Apel and Horney 2017; Apel and Powell 2019; Dwyer Emory 2021; Haney 2018; Turetsky and Waller 2020). Unsurprisingly, criminal legal system contact has been shown to undermine fathers’ contributions of time and resources to their families. Indeed, mothers who share children with formerly incarcerated men received less voluntary and formal support from either nonresident fathers (Geller et al. 2011; McLeod and Gottlieb 2018; Dwyer Emory et al. 2020) or others in their networks (Turney et al. 2012).

In sum, large-scale changes have unfolded in the decades since Making Ends Meet was first published that have substantially limited the viability of support from nonresident fathers as a survival strategy for single mothers. While some mothers have benefited from these changes, those unable to capitalize on the work-focused safety net that has emerged find themselves also unable to depend on support from their children’s fathers, a key means of making ends meet in the pre-welfare reform era. Changes in the labor market and greater exposure to punitive systems have had profoundly negative implications for fathers’ economic prospects, social connections, and even health, and virtually all of these changes have had a greater impact on lower-SES men and Black or Latino men (Battle 2018; Adams 2018; Pratt 2016; Nepomnyaschy and Miller 2023; Smeeding et al. 2011). As fathers struggle to meet their own basic needs, fewer resources are available to support single mothers. Financially strained fathers are also more likely to experience physical and emotional problems, including poor physical health, depression, and substance use (Robbins et al. 2022; Massoglia and Remster 2019; Williams 2003), likely further limiting their ability to provide effective and consistent support. What resources they do have are likely to first go toward supporting their current-household needs over those of nonresident children and custodial mothers (Edin and Nelson 2013). There can even be a reversal in the flow of resources away from children’s families through kinship networks as families struggle to support incapacitated men, as has been documented in cases of criminal justice involvement (Braman 2004; Katzenstein and Waller 2015; Miller 2021; Page et al. 2019). Thus, the socioeconomic precarity fathers face is likely to have implications for entire kin networks, as men have fewer resources to distribute and may even draw on the resources of kin and romantic partners to help meet their own needs.

CURRENT STUDY

In this study, we use longitudinal population-based data from an economically, racially, and ethnically diverse sample to identify and describe multiple dimensions of nonresident fathers’ socioeconomic precarity and access to support that could potentially affect custodial mothers’ economic well-being. We describe nonresident fathers’ socioeconomic circumstances using five broad conceptual domains related to the policy changes outlined above and to existing research on the multifaceted sources of socioeconomic disadvantage fathers face (Osborne 2020; Smeeding et al. 2011; Nepomnyaschy and Miller 2023). We first capture three domains of fathers’ socioeconomic precarity. Given the shift in the years after Making Ends Meet to a work-based safety net and co-occurring erosion in the low-wage labor market, we first examine fathers’ employment precarity. Because of the expansion of the CSE and criminal legal systems over this period and their impact on low-SES families, we also measure fathers’ exposure to these two punitive systems. Related to these, we also examine fathers’ resource precarity, or their challenges meeting their own households’ needs. We next measure two potential sources of support fathers may use to mitigate hardship, specifically support from private networks and receipt of public benefits. Finally, we examine the extent to which the three domains of fathers’ socioeconomic precarity (employment, exposure to punitive systems, and resource precarity) are associated with economic insecurity in mothers’ households, controlling for a rich set of individual, family, and structural factors that may confound this association.

METHODS

Our study takes advantage of five waves of population-based data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). In many ways, the FFCWS is an ideal dataset for this study as it contains unparalleled information about a group of fathers who were first interviewed in the three years after Making Ends Meet was published and who were followed over the period when many of the policy and economic changes described earlier were unfolding. Specifically, FFCWS has followed a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000 and their biological parents, tracking these families in the period immediately following welfare reform and through the resultant changes to the economy and social welfare state. The study oversampled births to unmarried mothers (a 3 to 1 ratio) and is representative of all such births in large cities (population greater than 200,000) at that time (Reichman et al. 2001). Mothers and available fathers were interviewed at the child’s birth, with follow-up interviews when their children were approximately one year old (interviewed in 1999–2002), three years old (interviewed in 2001–2003), five years old (interviewed in 2003–2006), and nine years old (interviewed 2007–2010). While additional surveys were conducted when children were ages fifteen and twenty-two, fathers were only consistently interviewed in the first five waves of the FFCWS. As most of the detailed indicators of fathers’ precarity are self-reported, our study uses data from these earlier waves to capture with as much rigor as possible this population of fathers who are famously invisible in most national surveys (Pettit 2012). This study thus focuses on the families whose pre-welfare reform experiences in the early 1990s were documented by Making Ends Meet, following them during a period of rapid policy change that led to the modern welfare state documented by the other articles in this issue. While data only cover the period from 1999 to 2010, there is strong reason to expect findings to apply to fathers in the current era, as the conditions underlying nonresident fathers’ economic precarity have not substantively improved across most domains (Binder and Bound 2019).

RESULTS

Our analysis describes fathers with nonmarital births who were living apart from their children’s mothers during the post-welfare reform era, a group who are the counterparts of the men with whom the mothers in Making Ends Meet shared children. Our results indicate that struggles for this group persist. Overall, socioeconomic precarity among these fathers was pervasive, with at least one type of socioeconomic precarity present for a stunning 96 percent of observations. To further contextualize this finding, over the four waves of data in our study, 98.4 percent of these nonresident fathers described at least one wave of exposure to employment precarity, system contact, or resource precarity; only 1.6 percent experienced no precarity. As illustrated in table A.1, while the overwhelming majority of the fathers in the sample were working age (98 percent), only 69 percent reported good health, and most had a high school education (39 percent) or less (38 percent). In addition, 39 percent of fathers reported that the focal child lived with them at least half of the time, and most of these fathers were also connected to children other than the study focal child: 54 percent had another biological or adopted child; 30 percent lived with another biological or adopted child in their current household; and more than half (55 percent) lived in a household with at least one minor child. These attributes put these fathers at greater risk of economic precarity and suggest that they may struggle to meet their own needs, those of their households, and those of nonresident children and custodial mothers. Nonetheless, the vast majority of fathers (85 percent) provided some kind of financial or in-kind support to the focal child’s mother.

The level of hardship reported by the mothers with whom the fathers in our sample share children underscores the similarities between our sample and the families in Making Ends Meet. As shown in table 1, about half of mothers in our pooled sample across four waves of data reported experiences of economic precarity in the form of either poverty (53 percent) or material hardship (46 percent), and approximately 72 percent of mothers in the sample reported experiencing either of those outcomes. As illustrated in figure 1, while mothers and fathers have a good deal of overlapping economic precarity, mothers on average reported lower income-to-poverty ratios than fathers, indicating lower incomes and deeper poverty. Supplemental analyses (not shown) echoed this finding, indicating that on average mothers were more likely to report material hardship and economic precarity than the men with whom they shared children. Thus, while our results and discussion emphasize the challenges faced by fathers and the constraints they face supporting their own households and those of their children’s custodial mothers, we view their precarity as shaping the resources available to mothers struggling to make ends meet post-welfare reform.

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Figure 1.

Income-to-Poverty Ratios Among Fathers and Mothers at Year 1

Source: Authors’ calculations.

Multivariate Results

Figures 2 and 3 present results of our multilevel linear models that account for the nesting of observations at the father and state levels, possible confounding variables measured at the child’s birth, and survey wave. These models separately capture the associations between different facets of fathers’ socioeconomic precarity (employment precarity, punitive system exposure, and resource precarity) and mothers’ economic precarity (material hardship and poverty). They do not include measures of fathers’ private or public support, which, while relevant for understanding the depth of fathers’ precarity, are indirectly tied to mothers’ resources in ways that our data cannot adequately capture. Full results are available as appendix tables.

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Figure 2.

Fathers’ Socioeconomic Precarity and Mothers’ Likelihood of Experiencing Any Material Hardship

Source: Authors’ calculations.

Note: Bars represent increases in probability of mothers’ household poverty associated with each indicator of fathers’ socioeconomic precarity from separate multivariate random effects models including all previously described covariates.

⁺ p < .1; * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

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Figure 3.

Fathers’ Socioeconomic Precarity and Mothers’ Household Poverty (< 100% FPL)

Source: Authors’ calculations.

Note: Bars represent increases in probability of mothers’ household poverty associated with each indicator of fathers’ socioeconomic precarity from separate multivariate random effects models including all previously described covariates.

⁺ p < .1; * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

Figure 2 presents coefficients from regression models examining associations between each indicator of fathers’ precarity and the likelihood of mothers experiencing material hardship. Only two of the indicators of father employment precarity were associated with maternal hardship. Working irregular shifts was associated with a greater likelihood of mothers’ material hardship relative to fathers working consistent hours, as was fathers’ less than full-time, full-year work status. Interestingly, neither fathers’ unemployment nor low earnings were significantly associated with mothers’ hardship. Two indicators of exposure to punitive systems, having child support arrears and having been incarcerated, were associated with a greater likelihood of maternal material hardship. Fathers’ criminal legal contact without incarceration was not, however. Finally, turning to resource precarity, fathers’ experiences of being in poverty (less than 100 percent of the FPL) and being near poverty (100–200 percent of the FPL), having material hardship, and lacking health insurance were all associated with a higher likelihood of mothers’ material hardship. Of these measures of resource precarity, only fathers’ housing instability was not associated with mothers’ hardship. The strongest predictors (fathers’ material hardship and incarceration) were associated with approximately 24–26 percent higher likelihood of mothers’ material hardship, while the other indicators were associated with 8–11 percent higher likelihood (compared to the 53 percent sample mean).

Figure 3 presents associations between these same indicators of fathers’ socioeconomic precarity and mothers’ poverty, revealing some interesting differences from the results for material hardship. Like in the previous figure, fathers’ working less than full-time, full-year was associated with a greater likelihood of maternal poverty. Associations with the other facets of employment precarity diverge, however. While irregular work was not significantly associated with maternal poverty in these models, being unemployed (compared to employed with no irregular shifts) and earning less than the minimum wage were associated with a higher likelihood of mothers’ poverty. Weekly earnings were also associated with greater poverty but not material hardship, as shown in table A.2. Like the hardship outcome, having child support arrears or a history of incarceration was associated with a higher likelihood of poverty among mothers, though other types of criminal system contact did not differ from no contact at all. As with the measures of employment precarity, notable differences emerge for our measures of resource precarity. Only fathers’ poverty level and lack of health insurance were significantly associated with the likelihood of both material hardship and poverty among mothers. In contrast to the results for mothers’ material hardship, fathers’ experience of material hardship was only weakly associated with mothers’ poverty and fell short of conventional statistical significance (p < .10), while fathers’ housing instability was associated with a significantly higher risk of poverty only. For this outcome, the strongest relationship was for fathers’ poverty, which was associated with a 23 percent greater likelihood of maternal poverty, while the other indicators were associated with 7–13 percentage-point greater probability of maternal poverty (compared to the 46 percent sample mean).

DISCUSSION

This study provides insight into the inextricable link between the socioeconomic precarity of nonresident fathers and that of single mothers in the post-welfare reform era, suggesting that the deterioration of fathers’ economic standing has made it even more difficult for mothers to draw on private support to make ends meet. Edin and Lein (1997) documented the range of survival strategies that poor single mothers used in the early 1990s to fill gaps in their household budgets, including support from nonresident fathers. While this support was an important survival strategy for mothers in this era, it was also understood to be supplemental to income from work, welfare, and other network-based strategies. The restructuring of the social welfare system shortly after Making Ends Meet was published forced mothers to rely more heavily on private support both through their own work and from their children’s fathers. As captured by other papers in this issue, mothers have been pushed into low quality, unstable jobs both to meet their basic needs and to access public benefits.

Amidst these changes, it was expected that private support from nonresident fathers could compensate for the loss in cash benefits when women were forced out of the welfare system (Kurz and Hirsch 2003). The expansion of the child support enforcement system in this era was intended to offset the loss in cash welfare and compensate the state for mothers’ use of public benefits. In practice, this expansion has yielded few benefits for single mothers and has sometimes come at great cost to family systems (Cuesta and Meyer 2018; Robbins et al. 2022; Nepomnyaschy et al. 2021; Turner and Waller 2017; Nepomnyaschy 2007). This study illustrates that nonresident fathers face multiple forms of socioeconomic precarity, perhaps even more than was the case in the early 1990s, which undermine their ability to fill mothers’ resource gaps. These fathers have instead found themselves buffeted by changes in economic and social policy that have created stagnancy in the labor market for all but the highest earning men, and have disproportionately exposed the most vulnerable fathers to punitive systems that exacerbate their economic insecurity.

Our study draws on data from the first decade after welfare reform using a large population-based sample of fathers who are much like those described by mothers in the original Making Ends Meet study. Our descriptive analysis shows that nearly every father (98 percent) experienced at least one type of socioeconomic precarity. Although most were employed, nearly half reported having work that was irregular, unstable, or insufficient to keep their earnings above the equivalent of the minimum wage. Fathers also reported extensive involvement with both the child support enforcement and criminal legal systems (including over half reporting a history of incarceration) that likely compounded their employment and resource precarity. In turn, a substantial proportion of the fathers also reported lacking the resources needed to support their households, pay bills, maintain housing, or access health care. Fathers also reported receiving relatively limited private and public safety net support to offset these challenges. Whether this finding reflects fathers’ ineligibility for more generous public benefits available to custodial parents like the EITC, lack of knowledge about available resources, or circumstances in which fathers have used all available resources and goodwill from their private networks, our study paints a picture of a population of men who are struggling on multiple fronts with few sources of support. While fathers reported having more household resources on average than their children’s mothers, these fathers were nonetheless not in a strong position to provide support for mothers’ households. Rather than having surplus resources to fill the gaps in single mothers’ budgets left by the restructuring of the social safety net, this widespread precarity more likely led fathers to draw on their networks to support themselves and the dependents in their current household.

Results from bivariate and multivariate regressions further illustrate that the economic precarity of mothers and nonresident fathers is closely linked even after their romantic relationship has ended. Not all aspects of fathers’ precarity are equally consequential for mothers, however, and our findings shed light on important nuances in how parents’ situations are linked. First, fathers’ exposure to punitive systems was more consistently linked with both material hardship and poverty among mothers than their employment or resource precarity. The consistency of these associations emphasizes how policies primarily targeting men can have serious negative implications for the economic stability of mothers and children. Second, there was a consistent association between fathers’ experiences of material hardship and poverty and mothers’ experiences of the same type of precarity, though the strength of the association was greatest for the most disadvantaged fathers. These patterns suggest that policies designed to assist the most disadvantaged fathers could have positive spillovers for economically vulnerable mothers. Finally, there was important variation in which types of maternal economic well-being were sensitive to different measures of fathers’ precarity. Among the indicators of fathers’ employment and resource precarity, only fathers’ lack of full-time, full-year employment, poverty, and lack of health insurance were associated with both mothers’ poverty and material hardship. Future research should examine why and how different forms of fathers’ precarity are associated with different aspects of mothers’ economic well-being.

The data used in this study provide a snapshot of fathers in the post-welfare reform era, from 1999 to 2010. While we do not document the precarity of nonresident fathers after 2010, the persistence of the sociodemographic, political, and economic changes that gave rise to the pronounced levels of hardship documented in this analysis suggests the circumstances of these men are unlikely to have substantially changed in the intervening fifteen years. Fathers’ employment precarity continues to be shaped by declining men’s labor force participation (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024), a labor market increasingly characterized by unstable jobs (Ananat and Gassman-Pines 2021), and ongoing wage stagnation (Binder and Bound 2019). These trends, many of which also impacted low-SES single mothers, were exacerbated by the COVID pandemic’s disruption of low-wage labor markets (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2024). Fathers’ system exposure has shifted somewhat over the last fifteen years. Incarceration rates began declining nationally around 2009 (Carson 2020), though this trend reversed after a sharp but temporary decline during the COVID pandemic (Mueller 2024; Zeng 2024; Kaeble 2024). The benefits of lower incarceration rates are likely attenuated by the lingering collateral consequences of past criminal justice contact and the strain of even low-level system involvement (Kohler-Hausmann 2018). Similarly, while fewer child support orders are being established (Cancian et al. 2023), the amount of arrears in the CSE system has increased over the last few decades, and there has been little abatement of punitive collection measures (Nepomnyaschy and Miller 2023; Battle et al. 2024). While fathers’ resource precarity was likely improved by the 2014 Affordable Care Act’s expansion of health care access, this gain is balanced against losses to the overall health of men most likely to be nonresident fathers (Pathak et al. 2022) and rising housing costs (DeLuca and Rosen 2022). Moreover, nonresident fathers remain largely ineligible for public benefits programs that kept mothers afloat during the most difficult years of this period. Thus, today’s fathers are likely in similarly, if not more, precarious positions than those documented in this study.

These findings must be considered in light of some potential limitations. First, though our findings paint a robust picture of the link between nonresident fathers’ precarity and the economic well-being of custodial mothers and their children, our analyses are not causal and results should be interpreted with all the usual caveats pertinent to analyses of observational data. Thus, while we can firmly conclude that the circumstances of nonresident fathers and their children’s mothers are connected, we cannot assess whether fathers’ precarity causes that of mothers. Rather, our findings likely show both a relationship between fathers’ and mothers’ economic standing as well as the well-recognized tendency for homogamy, or mothers with the fewest resources partnering and having children with fathers in similar circumstances. Second, our reliance on fathers’ reports of their socioeconomic circumstances limits our analyses to fathers who were interviewed at each wave. While the use of data on this group of fathers, who are mostly missing in national datasets (Pettit 2012), is a key contribution of our study, the interviewed fathers are more economically advantaged and more connected to their children’s mothers than those who were not interviewed. While our sensitivity analyses did not find worse outcomes for mothers who shared children with fathers who never participated in the survey, our study cannot fully capture the experiences of mothers who do not know or who have no connection with their child’s father. Thus, our results likely underestimate the economic precarity of both fathers and mothers as well as the strengths of these associations in the population of such families.

Our study set out to examine how nonresident fathers have fared since the publication of Making Ends Meet, and how their circumstances are linked to those of mothers closely resembling the original subjects of Edin and Lein’s book. Whatever the cause of the link between mothers’ and fathers’ circumstances, our findings support a key conclusion from that seminal work: that single mothers cannot rely primarily on private contributions from nonresident fathers to survive. Despite the assumption that fathers’ support could compensate for the loss of cash welfare, this updated portrait of nonresident fathers finds them struggling to meet their own needs. Relying on either fathers’ voluntary support or punitive child support enforcement mechanisms to provide economic security to mothers has been largely counterproductive given the extent and level of socioeconomic precarity among nonresident fathers. Indeed, this interpretation is supported by declining collections in the past several decades (Pilarz and Cuesta 2025; Grall 2002, 2020). Thus, while some mothers have benefited from the reconfigured social safety net, those who fell through the cracks of public support likely found themselves without a strong private safety net, as fathers’ own precarity undermined the viability of this survival strategy.

Our findings suggest a two-pronged policy approach that seeks to promote both fathers’ and mothers’ economic well-being may better support vulnerable families. First, the results demonstrate the need for addressing the socioeconomic precarity of nonresident fathers with whom single mothers share children. Fathers’ well-being, social and financial, matters for the well-being of their children and their children’s households. Rather than becoming a reliable private resource for mothers in the post-welfare reform era, the evidence shows that fathers face omnipresent, multifaceted precarity that likely compounds the precarity of the most vulnerable mothers. Addressing the sources of socioeconomic precarity among fathers is thus likely to have spillover benefits for mothers most reliant on fathers as sources of private support. These findings indicate that fathers’ incarceration, child support arrears, material hardship, and poverty are most salient for mothers’ economic insecurity.

The multifaceted and interconnected nature of fathers’ precarity precludes simple policy solutions, instead requiring a systematic reconfiguration of the policy supports available to low-SES families. As outlined in greater detail in other scholarship (Osborne 2020; Nepomnyaschy and Miller 2023; Turetsky and Waller 2020), this would involve improving access to high-quality employment opportunities and public benefits, whether by making these supports more universal or ensuring that nonresident parents are not excluded from existing programs. Commonsense reforms to the CSE and the criminal legal systems could have immediate benefits and mitigate the impact of these systems on other types of precarity. For example, implementing federal requirements to ensure that child support orders reflect actual earnings and ability to pay, include a self-support reserve, and are able to be modified during incarceration would ensure that fathers are better able to meet their own needs and contribute to their children while avoiding unmanageable debt. Reducing or eliminating penalties for the nonpayment of child support arrears, such as incarceration or driver’s license suspension, would further help fathers maintain formal employment. Likewise, reducing the scale and scope of criminal justice involvement and the collateral consequences that follow would help to promote fathers’ ability to support custodial mothers, for instance by minimizing barriers to stable employment.

Second, efforts are needed to shore up the economic standing of mothers falling through the cracks of the reconfigured social safety net directly rather than leaving these mothers to rely on increasingly scarce sources of private support. Single-parent families in the US have a much greater risk of poverty than those in other rich countries, in large part due to differences in public benefits available to them (Aerts et al. 2022). Policies that address mothers’ needs directly, such as guaranteed minimum child support assurance, child tax credits, and child-focused allowances that are provided to families in most other rich countries, can effectively provide mothers and children with economic stability, even in the face of nonresident fathers’ economic precarity (Pilkauskas and Bruey 2026, this issue; Bruch et al. 2026; Cancian and Meyer 2018; Nepomnyaschy et al. 2022). The possibilities of these programs are illustrated by findings such as the rate of child poverty more than doubling after the expanded, fully refundable Child Tax Credit expired in 2022 (Shrider and Creamer 2023. Material hardship, such as food and housing insecurity or difficulty paying rent and bills, also decreased after the implementation of cash transfer programs during the COVID pandemic, especially for the lowest income households (Cooney and Shaefer 2021).

In sum, our findings identify a critical weakness in implicit assumptions that private support would fill the gaps in the restructured safety net faced by single mothers in the post-welfare reform era. Fathers, whose own socioeconomic precarity has been exacerbated by efforts to enforce expectations of support, cannot provide a sufficient private safety net to catch mothers who fall through the holes in the reconfigured public support system. Private support from fathers thus remains an unreliable survival strategy for the most vulnerable single mothers, perhaps even more unreliable now than it was when Edin and Lein first asked how these mothers made ends meet.