NON–CHILD SUPPORT EXPENDITURES ON CHILDREN BY NONRESIDENTIAL DIVORCED FATHERS

Most states' child support guidelines adopt a "cliff" model in providing credits or adjustments for time spent in the nonresidential parent's home. Such guidelines implicitly or explicitly assume that no appreciable expenditures are made directly by obligors for child-rearing expenses at levels of contact or visitation beneath some threshold value, typically assumed to be around 30% time. As guideline developers are acutely aware, these assumptions have proceeded in the absence of any data. The present investigation sought to provide preliminary evidence of such expenditures by using the approach of getting information about the provision of certain benchmark items: clothes, toys and games, bicycles, a bedroom, and support for car-related expenses for teenage drivers. The authors generally found a linear, rather than a cliff-like, relationship of expenditures to time in the nonresidential father's home, with unexpectedly high levels of father's provision of these benchmark items even at quite low levels of contact. These findings support more generous and more continuous adjustments for visitation in child support schemes, to offset nonresidential parent's direct expenditures on children, which appear to be unexpectedly high and arise on a non-cliff-like pattern.