The Denial of Visitation Rights: A Preliminary Look at its Incidence, Correlates, Antecedents and Consequences

The issue of visitation denial has inspired considerable debate and legislative activity. This article presents empirical evidence on the scope of the problem and the relationship between visitation and child support payment behaviors. Visitation denial is shown to be a problem, although reported levels of denial fall below both levels of non-contact by absent parents and non-payment of child support noted in previous research. Visitation difficulties appear to become established fairly early on in the separation/divorce process and fail to deviate over time. Although non-payment of child support cases do not always involve a visitation problem, the two phenomena are related with visitation problem cases being more likely to involve non-payment of child support. The data do not permit a deciphering of causal order in cases that involve both types of non-compliance. However, both phenomena appear to stem from conflict patterns between the parents which are detectable at early stages of the divorce process. These findings inspire several recommendations, including interventions with divorcing parents aimed at enhancing their communication skills and reducing levels of anger and hostility and the need to develop mechanisms in which visitation and child support grievances can be jointly aired.