Mental health and past and pre-existing family relationships are among the risk factors associated with low-income unmarried fathers who have little or no contact with their children, an issue brief from Mathematica Policy Research finds.

Based on data from a voluntary relationship skills-education program for unmarried couples who were expecting or had just had a baby, the brief, Evidence From the Building Strong Families Evaluation: Limited Father Involvement: Which Families Are Most at Risk? (8 pages, PDF), found that fathers who showed signs of psychological distress at program entry — fully one in five — were at greatest risk of becoming absent fathers within three years. Fathers whose relationship with the child's mother was poor, who had a child from a previous relationship, or who had grown up without a father also were likely to have very limited involvement with their children.

While 62 percent of the couples who were romantically involved lived together at the start of the program, only 46 percent did so three years later, leaving more than half the children with non-resident fathers. According to the mothers in the study, 32 percent of non-resident fathers had not spent an hour with their child in the past month, 26 percent had done so every day or almost every day, and 19 percent a few times a week. The analysis also found that 52 percent of fathers who do not live with but are in regular contact with their children provide substantial child support, compared with only 15 percent of those who rarely see their children, and that they have similarly high levels of engagement, paternal warmth, and co-parenting quality as resident fathers.

"These two groups of non-resident fathers are very different," said Robert Wood, MPR senior fellow and the lead author of the analysis. "We found high-contact non-resident fathers often provide substantial financial support for their children and have levels of paternal engagement and warmth similar to those of resident fathers. In contrast, low-contact non-resident fathers typically provide little financial support for their children and often have poor relationships with their children and co-parents."

Given that psychological distress emerged as the strongest predictor of low-contact non-resident fatherhood three years later, the report recommends including materials that address mental health issues into relationship skills programming, as well as screening participants for signs of psychological distress and referring those most in need for mental health services. "Our findings suggest that relationship skills education programs serving unmarried parents may need to be paying greater attention to mental health issues, particularly among the dads," said Wood.