When Children Have Two Fathers: Effects of Relationships With Stepfathers and Noncustodial Fathers on Adolescent Outcomes

Journal of Marriage and Family 63 (February 2001): 155–167 155

LYNN WHITE AND JOAN G. GILBRETH

University of Nebraska—Lincoln

l

When Children Have Two Fathers: Effects of

Relationships With Stepfathers and Noncustodial Fathers

on Adolescent Outcomes

Using data on 189 adolescents who have a livingbiological father and a resident stepfather, we ex-amined the effects of children’s relationships withboth fathers on child outcomes. Interview datafrom mothers and stepfathers provide an assess-ment of two types of child outcomes, internalizingand externalizing problems. Interviews with thechildren themselves provide data about the child’srelationships with the mother, stepfather, and bi-ological father. Results show a significant positiveassociation between quality of relationship withstepfathers and child outcomes. Relationshipswith noncustodial fathers have less consistent butappear to have positive effects on child outcomes.We find that many children have good relation-ships with both fathers and that, even controllingfor quality of relationship with the mother, goodrelationships with both fathers are associated withbetter child outcomes.

In the last 10 years, there has been a growinginterest in the effects of fathering on child out-comes (e.g., Amato & Gilbreth, 1999; Furstenberg& Harris, 1992; Hawkins & Eggebeen, 1991).Most of this research and theory is built on the

Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln,Lincoln, NE 68588-0324 ([email protected]).

Key Words: adolescent outcomes, noncustodial father,stepfather.

assumption that children will have only one father.Increasingly, however, parental remarriages andcohabitations supply children with two fathers,neither of whom is the traditional biological, co-resident father. How noncustodial fathers andstepfathers should be handled in research and the-ory or even whether we need to account for themis unclear. To address the issue of whether thesefathers’ affect child outcomes, we need to go be-yond research that relies on measures of familystructure to consider the quality of relationshipsthat children have with stepfathers and noncusto-dial fathers.

In this article, we use data from 189 adoles-cents who have a living biological father and aresident stepfather to assess the effects of rela-tionships with both fathers on child outcomes. In-terview data from mothers and stepfathers providean assessment of two types of child outcomes, in-ternalizing and externalizing problems. Interviewswith the children themselves provide data aboutthe child’s relationships with the stepfather andnoncustodial father, as well as with the mother. Weasked whether, and under what conditions, thestepfather or the biological father has an effect onchild outcomes. (Theoretically, stepmother fami-lies are of equal interest. Because there are toofew cases of children living with residential step-mothers in the data set, we have simplified the textby limiting our discussion to stepfather families.)

156 Journal of Marriage and Family

PRIOR RESEARCH

It is estimated that approximately one third of allchildren will experience a married or cohabitingstepfamily before they reach age 18 (Bumpass,Raley, & Sweet, 1995). Given that only half of allchildren are at risk of experiencing a stepfamily(i.e., they live apart from one of their biologicalparents), the proportion of children with a non-custodial father who later add a stepfather is prob-ably closer to two thirds. This means that a greatmany children have two fathers. Despite these sta-tistical patterns, few studies of fathering effectsconsider both fathers as potentially influential ac-tors in the child’s life. We review the separate lit-eratures on noncustodial fathers and stepfathersand, within each, we critically assess what weknow or can infer about how relationships witheach father might be influenced by the other’s ex-istence. We conclude with a set of alternative hy-potheses about how both fathers might affect childoutcomes.

Research on the Effects of Noncustodial Fathers

Many studies (summarized in Amato & Gilbreth,1999) have examined the effects of various di-mensions of noncustodial fathering on child out-comes. The bulk of this research examines pay-ment of child support and contact. Economicsupport appears to be a consistent predictor ofpositive outcomes for children (e.g., King, 1994;Selzter, 1991), but studies do not provide strongor consistent evidence that contact between non-resident fathers and their children makes a criticalcontribution to children’s well-being (Furstenberg& Cherlin, 1991; Hawkins & Eggebeen, 1991;McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994; Seltzer & Bianchi,1988). In a review of this research, Amato (1993)counted 15 studies reporting that contact withnonresident fathers has positive outcomes for chil-dren, 7 reporting negative outcomes, and 10showing no association.

An obvious criticism of this research is the nar-row way in which child’s relationship with thenoncustodial father has been measured. In a meta-analysis of the small body of research that usesricher measures of the relationship between childand noncustodial parent, Amato and Gilbreth(1999) showed that the average effect is small butpositive. For example, Simons (1996) found thatwhen nonresident fathers maintained parentingbehaviors characteristic of the residential family,such as providing emotional support to children,

offering praise, and dispensing discipline whennecessary, children scored higher on measures ofpostdivorce adjustment. The positive effect of par-ent-child affect is particularly interesting becauseseveral studies demonstrate that children may con-tinue to feel close to noncustodial fathers evenwhen contact is low (Furstenberg & Cherlin,1991; Munsch, Woodward, & Darling, 1995).

How are these effects of noncustodial fatheringchanged by stepfamily formation? A substantialamount of research demonstrates a negative cor-relation between custodial mother’s remarriageand noncustodial father’s contact with the child(Bronstein, Stoll, Clauson, Abrams, & Briones,1994; Furstenberg & Nord, 1985; Furstenberg,Nord, Peterson, & Zill, 1983; Seltzer & Bianchi,1988). The more important question, whether thechild’s relationship with the noncustodial fatherhas important consequences for child outcome af-ter mother’s remarriage, has been virtually unex-amined.

Stepfathers’ Effects on Child Outcomes

The empirical literature generally has concludedthat stepfathers have little or no effect on childoutcome. McLanahan and Sandefur (1994), forexample, demonstrated that for half a dozen in-dicators of child outcome across several majordata sets, children raised in stepfamilies show noadvantage over children raised by single mothers.They concluded that in terms of substantive out-comes, children from stepfamilies have only oneparent. Although this finding is based on a simplefamily structure variable rather than on familyprocess measures, it is supported by the consistentfinding that disengagement is the most commonparenting style among stepfathers (summarized inHetherington, 1988) and by research demonstrat-ing that a significant minority of stepfathers andstepchildren do not think of each other as family(Furstenberg, 1987). Regardless of the good in-tentions with which they entered the stepparentingrole, many stepfathers experience sufficient re-buffs from the children and sometimes from theirspouse that they eventually withdraw to the roleof chauffeur, bankroller, and handyman, eschew-ing any attempts at authoritative parenting.

Parallel to the work on noncustodial fathers,relatively little work links the quality of the step-fathers’ relationship with the child or the qualityof his parenting to the child’s outcomes. For ex-ample, in their thorough examination of adoles-cents after divorce, Buchanan, Maccoby, and

157When Children Have Two Fathers

Dornbusch (1996) measured only the presence orabsence of parents’ new partners and do not assessthe quality of the stepparent-stepchild relation-ship. Hetherington (1988), however, reported thatwhen stepfathers of elementary school-age chil-dren are engaged and parent authoritatively, step-sons have fewer behavioral problems. She foundno positive effects for girls even in the relativelyrare cases in which stepfathers provided appro-priate and supportive parenting.

Two structural characteristics of stepfamilies,formality of the union and length of the union,have been associated with stepfathers’ impact.Hetherington (1987) concluded that stepfathershave more influence on children, especially theirstepsons, in longer remarriages. In one of the fewstudies to consider how cohabiting stepparentsmight differ from married stepparents, Buchananand associates (1996) reported that cohabitingrather than married stepparents are associated withworse child outcomes.

An issue for our research is how children’s re-lationships with stepfathers are affected by theirrelationships with their noncustodial fathers andwhether stepfathers are likely to have more or lessof an impact on child outcomes when childrenhave good relationships with their noncustodialfathers. Generalizing from their small clinicalsample, Wallerstein and Kelly (1980) concludedthat stepparents’ relationships with children makethe most contribution to child outcomes when therelationship with the noncustodial father is trou-bled and distant. In a similar vein, Furstenbergand Spanier (1984) concluded that the better therelationship between children and the noncusto-dial father, the more trouble children have ac-cepting a stepfather. More recently, however, thelarger study by Buchanan et al. (1996) triangulat-ed information from children and parents andfound little correlation between quality of child’srelationship with father and with stepfather. Un-fortunately, this study did not go further to assessrespective effects on child outcomes.

The Present Study

Prior work suggests three logical alternatives forunderstanding the importance of fathers in thelives of children being raised by custodial mothersand stepfathers: an accumulation model, a substi-tution model, and a loss model. The accumulationmodel implies that children accumulate fathersand that both biological and stepfathers play animportant role in their lives. This model receives

modest support from a study by Hetherington,Cox, and Cox (1982), who demonstrated that agood relationship with the noncustodial fathercontinued to contribute to boys’, but not girls’,positive outcomes even when they acquired a sup-portive stepfather.

The substitution model suggests that childrensubstitute the stepfather for the biological father,so that the number of active fathers in a child’slife never rises above one. The substitution modelis parallel to the serial parenting model that hasbeen suggested for noncustodial fathers, that is,that they reduce ties to biological children to sym-bolic levels while directing their major fatheringactivities toward the children of the woman withwhom they are currently living (Furstenberg &Harris, 1992). The substitution model is supportedby the finding that mother’s remarriage is associ-ated with lower contact with the noncustodial fa-ther (Seltzer & Bianchi, 1988) and by a smallstudy suggesting that contact with noncustodialfathers is less important to children after they ac-quire a stepfather (Bray & Berger, 1990).

The loss model, supported by McLanahan andSandefur’s (1994) finding that children in step-families have approximately the same deficits inoutcomes as children in single-parent familieswhen compared with two-biological-parent fami-lies, suggests that children neither accumulate norsubstitute fathers, they merely lose them. In short,neither father has much impact on child outcomes.This alternative is supported by research showingthat disengagement is the predominant parentingstyle for stepfathers (Hetherington, 1988) and byresearch showing how often noncustodial fathersand their children lose contact (Furstenberg &Harris, 1992).

The present study used adolescents’ reports ontheir relationships with noncustodial fathers andstepfathers to predict two measures of child out-comes, internalizing and externalizing problems,as reported by the parents. Controlling for child’srelationship to the mother, we asked whether bothfathers, neither father, or only one father has animpact on child outcomes. In addition to estab-lishing main effects, we considered whether theeffects of one father depend on quality of child’srelationship with the other father and the mother.We also considered other factors suggested tomodify the effects of noncustodial and stepfatherson child outcomes: child’s age and gender, lengthof the new union, whether the new union is a mar-riage or a cohabitation, length of time since the


child has lived with the biological father, and con-tact with him.

Because outcome and relationship quality datacome from different reporters, the study avoidedinflation of the relationships through commonmethod bias. It is the first study of which we areaware that assesses child’s reports of quality ofrelationship with two fathers and systematicallyrelates these to child outcomes.

STUDY DESIGN

Sample

Data for this analysis came from the second waveof the National Survey of Families and House-holds (NSFH). The first wave in 1986–1987 in-terviewed 13,015 individuals. The sampling de-sign oversampled African Americans, Latinos,Puerto Ricans, the recently married, cohabitants,and those in stepfamilies. The response rate was74%. Attrition was somewhat higher for AfricanAmericans, for men, and for those under 25 andover 75 (Sweet, Bumpass, & Call 1988).

At the first interview, 1,900 parents answereda set of questions about a randomly selected childbetween the ages of 5 and 11. Approximately1,700 of these parents were reinterviewed 5 to 7years later, and permission was requested to in-terview the child by telephone. Interviews werecompleted with nearly 1,500 of the children.Comparing the Time 1 characteristics of parentswhose children were and were not interviewedshows a pattern of attrition similar to that for thegeneral sample. Loss was highest for childrenwhose parents were African American or Latino,had lower education at Time 1, or experienced amarital status change during the interval, and formale children, children who were older at the timeof the interviews, and those no longer living withtheir parents at the second interview.

The subsample used in this analysis includesadolescents who lived with their mother and astepfather and had a living noncustodial father.Unfortunately, the data set contains limited infor-mation about the noncustodial parent. Motherswere asked to report on the noncustodial father’scharacteristics, but the level of missing data is sohigh (over 50%) that it was impractical to includein an already-small sample. We omitted childrenwhose biological father was deceased and childrenwho did not live with the main respondent. In de-fining family type, we relied on the children’s re-ports, which were gathered an average of 11

months after the parent interview. Of the 214 cas-es in which children reported that their motherwas married or cohabiting, 23 of the parents saidthey had no partner when they were interviewed.The 15 children who went on to provide infor-mation about their relationship with the stepfatherwere retained in the analysis on the assumptionthat their parent had acquired a partner in the in-terim. The other eight were omitted. Because ofmissing data on the measures of outcomes andchild’s relationships to parents, the final samplesize was 189 for the main analysis.

Measurement

Dependent variables. Child outcomes were as-sessed by a battery of questions developed byAchenbach and Edelbrock (1981) that were in-cluded in the parent interview. The parent report-ed whether each statement was never true (1),sometimes true (2), or often true (3) of the child.The scale of internalizing problems averaged 9items (e.g., is unhappy, sad, or depressed; feelsworthless or inferior). The externalizing problemsscale was an average of 12 items (e.g., is impul-sive or acts without thinking; is restless or overlyactive, cannot sit still). The scales have acceptablereliabilities (alpha 5 .82 and .86) and range from1 (no problems) to 3 (all problems).

In 30 cases, the child outcome measures werebased on stepfathers’ reports rather than mother’s;however, analysis (not shown) indicated that therelationship (alternatively, gender) of the reporterwas unrelated to number of problems reported.Because relationships were reported by the childrather than the stepfather, findings should be un-biased.

Independent variables. The independent variableswere the quality of child’s relationship with moth-er, father, and stepfather as reported by the child.Relationship with each parent was an average ofsix items: how often parent criticizes, how oftenparent praises (1 5 never to 5 5 almost everyday), how likely to talk to parent if depressed,how likely to talk to parent about a major decision(1 5 definitely wouldn’t to 5 5 definitely would),how much child admires parent (0 5 not at all to10 5 a tremendous amount), and child’s assess-ment of overall relationship with parent (0 5 re-ally bad to 10 5 absolutely perfect). The ‘‘criti-cize’’ question was recoded inversely, and the two11-point scales were transformed to match therange of the other questions. The scale has a the-


TABLE 1. DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND BIVARIATE CORRELATIONS

M SD

Bivariate correlations with

InternalizingProblems

ExternalizingProblems

Internalizing problemsExternalizing problemsChild’s quality of relationships

MotherStepfatherNoncustodial father (n 5 157)

1.411.57

3.983.413.44

.35

.41

.70

.901.26

1.0.75**

2.26**2.29**2.04

.75**1.00

2.18**2.17**2.06

Noncustodial good (.3.4)Noncustodial weak (#3.4)(No relationship, omitted)

Child’s ageFemale childParent’s education

.46

.25

13.83.54

12.53

.50

.43

2.15.50

1.72

2.14*2.06

.032.01

.01

2.132.08

2.112.14*2.03

Family income (in $10,000)Income not reportedParent AngloNumber children in householdYears current unionNoncustodial father makes a financial contribution

4.75.02.76

2.163.32.42

3.44.14.43

1.022.82.50

.062.06

.14*2.042.102.05

2.052.00

.07

.052.14*2.10

Stepfamily cohabitingNo contact with noncustodial fatherFrequency of contact noncustodialYears noncustodial father absent (n 5 182)

.14

.303.21

10.37

.35

.462.363.56

.16*

.112.08

.03

.14*

.112.122.02

Note: Except where noted, data are based on 189 causes used in the central analyses. Bivariate correlations for the twodummy variables assessing relationship with noncustodial father are betas when problems are regressed on only those twomeasures.

*p , .05. **p , .01, one-tailed.

oretical range from 1 to 5 and has an alpha reli-ability of .70 for mothers, .81 for stepfathers, and.80 for noncustodial fathers. Twenty children whohad a relationship with their father but no contactin the last year were asked only the global rela-tionship quality question. For those 20 children,this value was used as the measure of relationshipwith the noncustodial father.

A more significant problem was a group of 31children who were not asked any of the questionsabout relationship quality because they claimed norelationship with their father and another 20 whowould not answer the questions. Because stepfa-thers might have different effects on child well-being in cases of biological father absence andbecause absence of relationship might have im-portant effects on well-being, we wanted to retainthese cases in the analysis. As a result, the qualityof child’s relationship with the noncustodial fatherwas measured by a set of dummy variables. Di-viding at the mean of relationship quality amongreporting children, dummy variables for good (3.5to 5.0) and weak (1.0 to 3.4) affective relation-ships with noncustodial fathers were contrasted tothe omitted category of no relationship. Table 1

includes the mean for the continuous measureamong reporting children (n 5 157) and the dum-my variables actually used in the analysis.

Moderating and control variables. Years in cur-rent union is the number of years the main re-spondent reported being with the current partner.For the 15 mothers who had no partner at the timeof their interview, years with current partner wasestimated as the midpoint between the time of herand the child’s interview. Years since child livedwith the biological father was based on mother’sreport. When the mother said that the child hadnever lived with the biological father, child’s agewas substituted for years since lived with the bi-ological father. Seventeen cases were missing onthis variable because of mother’s failure to answer.Because of the missing cases and because the var-iable had little effect on the central analysis, thevariable for years absent was used only in inter-action tests and not as a routine control. A vari-able for child’s contact with the noncustodial par-ent (as measured by the child’s report of thefrequency of visiting or the frequency of talkingor getting a letter from the father, whichever was


greater) was omitted from the central analysis be-cause contact was already part of the ordinalscheme through which relationship with the non-custodial father was measured. We did examinewhether the effects of noncustodial or stepfatherrelationships depended on contact frequency inthe analysis of interaction effects.

Child’s gender was coded as female 5 1, male5 0, and child’s age was measured in years. So-cioeconomic status was measured by respondent’syears of completed education and by the custodialfamily’s total household income (reported in$10,000s). The 2% who failed to report their in-come were coded 0 on income and noted with adummy variable. Dummy variables indicatewhether the household received any alimony orchild support, race or ethnicity (Anglo 5 1, else5 0), and whether the mother was cohabiting (asopposed to married). Number of children in thehousehold was also included as a control. Meansand standard deviations are presented in Table 1.

Analysis Strategy

The measures of adolescent outcomes are contin-uous variables so ordinary least squares regressionwas the primary statistical tool. Because the di-rection of effect was predicted, we used a one-tailed test of significance. Because of the smallsize of the sample, we tested for outliers and dis-carded two cases whose internalizing and exter-nalizing problems were extreme. Because com-plex sampling strategies may result in anunderestimate of standard error, we reran our anal-ysis on 52 random replicates of the sample andcalculated new standard errors for our central co-efficients. This balanced repeated replicationmethod (Lee, Forthhofer, & Lorimer, 1989) hasbeen shown to be an effective method to estimatewhether standard errors based on the assumptionof a simple random sampling design are seriouslyunderestimated. Design effects (differences be-tween old and new standard errors) were small,and adjustment for them resulted in no substantivechanges in our conclusions (results available fromfirst author). The standard errors reported herewere taken from standard output.

FINDINGS

Quality of Relationships With Parents

The adolescent focal child interviews in 1994 in-cluded 476 children who lived with their mother

but not their father, had a living father, and livedin the main respondent’s household (i.e., the mainrespondent was their mother or stepfather ratherthan their noncustodial father). Of these children,our focus was on the 189 who had a stepfatherand for whom we had complete data. Within thisgroup, 30% had no contact with their father in thelast year, including 10% who said that they didnot know whether their father was alive or dead.

Table 1 provides the means and standard de-viations for children’s reports of relationship qual-ity with mothers, stepfathers, and noncustodial fa-thers. Children who reported on their noncustodialfathers reported almost identical levels of relation-ship quality with fathers and stepfathers (3.41 and3.44, respectively). Both types of relationshipswere less close than relationships with mothers(3.98), but relationships with both stepfathers andnoncustodial fathers were above the theoreticalmidpoint of these 5-point scales. For example, ad-olescents said the odds are greater than 50–50 thatthey would confide in these men if they had aproblem or were depressed, and they reported alevel of admiration for them that is above the mid-point on the scale. In addition to differences inmean values, relationships with parents differedsubstantially in variance, so that there was morevariance in evaluations of stepfathers than ofmothers and even more variance in evaluations ofnoncustodial fathers. In the case of noncustodialfathers, the larger variance was the result of asmall minority with the lowest possible relation-ship with their fathers combined with many whohad above average relationships.

Preliminary analysis examined the associationof these relationship measures to each other. Chil-dren’s evaluations of their mothers and stepfatherswere more highly correlated (r 5 .49) than theirevaluations of their mothers and noncustodial fa-thers (R 5 .25). Similar to the findings of Buch-anan and associates (1996), there was almost nocorrelation (R 5 .07) between their evaluations oftheir stepfathers and noncustodial fathers. Thus,spillover of family affection appeared to operateonly within the household. It does not appear asif children’s good relationships with their stepfa-thers were purchased at the expense of relation-ships with their natural fathers, nor does it appearthat children who got along with one father gotalong with the other; there is simply no relation-ship. Further analysis demonstrated that quality ofrelationship with stepfather was unrelated to acontinuous measure of child’s contact with thenoncustodial father (r 5 .00) and not related sig-


nificantly to a dummy variable indicating whetherthere was any contact (r 5 .06).

Predicting Child Outcomes

The central issue in this article is an examinationof the effects of children’s relationships with non-custodial fathers and stepfathers on children’s out-comes. Although it will be elaborated in multi-variate analyses, the basic story is evident in thebivariate correlations (Table 1). Parents’ reports ofinternalizing and externalizing problems werenegatively and significantly related to child’s re-port of relationship quality with the mother andthe stepfather. When children reported better re-lationships with their stepfathers, parents reportedthat children have fewer problems. Children whohad good (as opposed to no) relationships withtheir noncustodial father were also less likely tohave problems, but the correlations were weakerthan those for stepfathers and only significant forinternalizing problems. Having a weak (as op-posed to no) relationship with the noncustodial fa-ther was not correlated with child’s problems.

The multivariate analysis that follows controlsfor background variables and child’s relationshipwith the mother. We first examined the unique ef-fects of stepfathers and how these effects weremodified by variables such as child’s gender,child’s age, years in the stepfamily, years sincechild lived with noncustodial father, and contactwith the noncustodial father. The analysis wasthen repeated for noncustodial fathers and finallyfor both fathers together.

Mothers and Stepfathers

Models 1 through 3 on Table 2 summarize theresults when parent reports of internalizing andexternalizing problems are regressed on child’sevaluations of relationship quality for mothers andstepfathers and a set of control variables (fullequations appear in the Appendix).

After controlling for child’s age and gender,parent’s education, family income, race and eth-nicity, number of children under 18 in the house-hold, whether stepfamily was married or cohab-iting, years in the current union, and whethernoncustodial father contributed financially, the re-sults were similar to the bivariate correlations.Both relationship with mother and relationshipwith stepfather were associated significantly withfewer internalizing problems (Models I1 and I2)

and fewer externalizing problems (Models E1 andE2).

The high correlation between child’s relation-ship with mother and with stepfather (r 5 .49)makes it difficult to assess whether stepfathersmade an independent impact or were just sharingmother’s halo. If we added stepfather relationshipto an equation that already included relationshipwith mother (Models I3 and E3), the high corre-lation between the two produces chance out-comes: for internalizing problems, both appear tohave a significant effect and for externalizingproblems, neither parent seems to have a signifi-cant effect. Following a procedure used by Amato(1994), we divided the amount of variance ex-plained by these two variables into that contrib-uted uniquely by relationship with mothers,uniquely by relationship with stepfathers, and thatwhich was joint. For example, a comparison ofexplained variance between Model I3 and a con-trol-variable-only model (Model I0) shows that to-gether the two relationship variables add .095 toexplained variance (.175–.080 5 .095). If wedropped mothers from the equation (Model I2),this caused a loss of .020 or 21% of the total(.020/.095). This can be interpreted as 21% of thetotal effect of mothers and stepfathers was con-tributed uniquely by mothers. Using the same log-ic, stepfathers uniquely explained 33%, leaving46% of the effect of parental relationships attrib-utable to the joint effects of mothers and stepfa-thers. For externalizing problems, the figures are26%, 24%, and 50%. A conservative conclusionis that stepfathers share with mothers in the sig-nificant association between good parental rela-tionships and child outcomes.

This finding suggests that good relationshipswith stepfathers have a meaningful independentpositive effect on child outcomes. This result isnot consistent with the loss model and suggeststhat in acquiring stepfathers, children add an ef-fective parent. Alternatively, of course, this cross-sectional evidence may mean that well-adjustedchildren are more likely to develop positive rela-tionships with their stepfathers.

The next stage in the analysis considers wheth-er the effect of stepfathers differs significantly bychild’s age and gender, years in stepfamily oryears since lived with a noncustodial father,whether stepfamily was created by a cohabitationor a marriage, child’s contact with the noncusto-dial father, or the quality of the child’s relationshipwith the noncustodial father or the mother. A mul-tiplicative term was created for each hypothesized


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moderating variable and added one at a time toModel 2. (When the proposed modifying variablewas not one of the routine controls, the modifyingvariable was also added.) This resulted in 16 sep-arate tests (2 dependent variables 3 8 moderatingvariables). Only one was statistically significant:relationship with stepfather interacted significantlywith mother’s marital status in its effect on exter-nalizing problems (b 5 2.256, p 5 .034). Al-though this is not more than would occur bychance, the direction of effect is consistent acrossboth dependent variables, and this direction isconsistent with past work. We interpreted theseresults (not shown) as indicating that the greaterchild problems associated with cohabitation arereduced when the child has a good relationshipwith the stepfather. Put another way, the qualityof the stepfather relationship is especially impor-tant to child outcomes when he is a cohabitingrather than a married stepfather. The associationbetween child’s relationship with the stepfatherand child’s problems was not affected significantlyby age, gender, years in stepfamily, years apartfrom noncustodial father, financial contribution ofor contact with the noncustodial father, or child’srelationship with mother or noncustodial father.

Noncustodial Fathers

Multivariate results showed no significant associ-ation between quality of child’s relationship witha noncustodial father and with parent’s reports ofoutcome measures (Models I4 and E4, Table 2).Addition of these two measures for noncustodialfathers did not result in a significant improvementin explained variance over the control variablemodel. Thus, although the general tendency is forgood relationships with noncustodial fathers to beassociated with positive outcomes for children,this is not so strongly the case as with good step-father relationships.

Models five and six add the measures of rela-tionship quality with mothers and with stepfathersto the equation containing relationship with non-custodial fathers. When we added relationshipwith mothers, effects for noncustodial fathers be-came even smaller. Coefficients for mothers werelittle affected by control for noncustodial fathers(compare Models 1 and 5), and very little of thetotal effect of mothers and noncustodial fatherscould be attributed uniquely to fathers. As wewould expect based on the very low bivariate cor-relation between relationships with stepfathers andnoncustodial fathers, effects for stepfathers and

noncustodial fathers in Model 6 are nearly iden-tical to those in Models 2 and 4.

We considered whether there were any circum-stances under which quality of relationship withnoncustodial fathers predicted child outcomes sig-nificantly in this sample. Multiplicative termswere created to test whether the effects of non-custodial fathers depend on child’s age or gender,years since father had lived with the child, wheth-er father made a financial contribution, contact be-tween father and child, years child had lived withthe current stepfather, and child’s relationship withmother and stepfather. Only one of the 16 testswas statistically significant: The effect of relation-ship with the noncustodial father on internalizingproblems was significantly greater when he hadbeen absent from the home for a shorter period oftime. If father had been absent only 2 years, agood relationship with the father would reduce in-ternalizing problems by .828; after 10 years, theeffect would only be .364. The same pattern ofeffects was evident for externalizing problems.Because the average number of years absent inthis sample was 10.4, the average effect of non-custodial fathers is low. The effect of the child’srelationship with the noncustodial father was notmodified by child’s gender, age, child’s years inthe stepfamily, relationship with the stepfather orthe mother, or whether the noncustodial fathermade a financial contribution.

In evaluating these findings for noncustodialfathers, we need to raise an empirical question.Are these insignificant effects for noncustodial fa-thers due to the fact that all of the adolescents inour analysis have stepfathers who may have sup-planted noncustodial fathers in their children’slives, or are they indicative of a general low sa-lience of noncustodial fathers? Because this bearson the choice between a loss and a substitutionmodel, we move back to the full sample of moth-er-custody children to include the children withouta stepfather in our models. Among the 189 chil-dren whose mother was in a union, 45% reporteda good relationship with their noncustodial fathercompared with only 35% of the 232 childrenwhose mothers were not in union (p , .01). Onthe surface at least, mother’s new union was as-sociated with a stronger relationship between thechild and the noncustodial father. On the otherhand, 32% of the children whose mothers were inunion reported no relationship at all with theirnoncustodial father compared with only 18% ofchildren whose mothers were not in union (p ,.01).


TABLE 3. FULL SAMPLE OF ADOLESCENTS WITH NONCUSTODIAL FATHERS: EFFECTS OF ADOLESCENTS’ RELATIONSHIPS

WITH NONCUSTODIAL FATHERS ON INTERNALIZING AND EXTERNALIZING PROBLEMS

Internalizing Problems

I4a I5a

Externalizing Problems

E4a E5a

Quality of child’s relationship with:Mother

Noncustodial good 2.125**(.047)

2.121**(.024)

20.98**(.046)

2.139**(.051)

2.121**(.026)

2.111**(.050)

Noncustodial weak

Mother in new union

R2

2.078(.047)

2.057(.042).060

2.071(.041)

2.060(.041).113

2.107**(.051)

2.015(.045).071

2.100**(.026)

2.018(.044).116

Note: Ordinary least squares, unstandardized coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. n 5 432.aControls include child’s age, gender, and race and ethnicity, parent’s education, family income, number of children under

18 in the household, whether mother is married or cohabiting, number of years mother in union, and whether noncustodialfather makes a financial contribution to the household.

*p , .05. **p , .01, one-tailed.

To see whether effects of noncustodial fathers’relationships with children had different effectswhen mother was not in union, we replicatedModels 4 and 5 for the larger sample. In this anal-ysis, coefficients were somewhat larger than thosereported in models I4 and E4 and standard errorswere smaller, so that the results for the larger sam-ple were statistically significant (see Table 3). Wetested whether the effects of noncustodial fatherson child outcomes depended on mother’s newunion by adding two multiplicative terms to Mod-els I4a and E4a (noncustodial good 3 mother’sunion and noncustodial weak 3 mother’s union).The results were not significant, suggesting thatthe positive effect of having a good relationshipwith the noncustodial father is not limited to thosechildren whose mothers have not formed a newunion. Rather, the newly significant effects in Ta-ble 3 seem to be due to a larger sample size andconcomitantly smaller standard errors. We con-clude that a good relationship with a noncustodialfather probably has positive effects on adoles-cents, though these effects are weaker than thoseassociated with a good relationship with a step-father.

DISCUSSION AND SUMMARY

With this research, we set out to explore the rel-ative effect of stepfathers and noncustodial fathersamong adolescents who have both kinds of fa-thers. Our results demonstrate that children’s goodrelationships with their stepfathers are associated

with significantly lower risk of internalizing or ex-ternalizing problems. Having good affective rela-tionships with noncustodial fathers compared withhaving no relationship with him also has positiveeffects. The primary difference between the ef-fects of stepfathers and noncustodial fathers ap-pears to be that the benefits of a good relationshipwith a noncustodial father are more independentof the mother than are the benefits of a good re-lationship with the stepfather and that a good re-lationship with a noncustodial father explains lessof the variance in child outcomes.

The results appear to support an accumulationmore than a loss or a substitution model. We basethis conclusion on several strands of evidence.First, a good relationship with both fathers seemsto be associated with good outcomes (Tables 2 and3). Second, mean relationship scores are almostidentical among children who report on both fa-thers (Table 1). Third, there appears to be notradeoff in the effects of the two fathers. Not onlyis there no correlation between relationship withbiological fathers and stepfathers, but the effect ofquality of relationship with stepfathers on out-comes is not dependent on the quality of relation-ship with the noncustodial father or child’s contactwith him. Fourth, the effect of relationships withnoncustodial fathers does not depend on whethermother has formed a new union (Table 3). Finally,the proportion of children who report good rela-tionships with their noncustodial fathers is actu-ally higher in stepfamilies than in families wherethe mothers are not in union. Although a minority


of children lose contact with their noncustodialfather and may thus seem to have serial fathers,many of these children lived with their father fora short time or not at all. These children did notso much replace their noncustodial father with astepfather as they filled a void with a stepfather.Approximately two thirds of the children beingraised in stepfather families continue to have arelationship with their noncustodial father and, onthe average, these relationships are pretty good.More important, a good relationships with eitherfather appears to have a positive impact on chil-dren’s well-being.

The results reported here provide a windowinto understanding how children’s relationshipswith noncustodial fathers and stepfathers affectchildren’s well-being. Because these results arecross-sectional, we cannot know whether good re-lationships with stepfathers, for example, causegood outcomes in children, whether the causal ef-fect goes the other way, or whether both are pro-duced by felicitous prior circumstances, for ex-ample, a happy, well-adjusted mother. In the caseof both noncustodial and stepfathers, this researchmust be considered merely an opening wedge inan effort to explore not simply presence versusabsence but quality of fathers’ parenting on childoutcomes.

Nevertheless, our research suggests some im-portant implications for future research. As Amatoand Gilbreth (1999) suggested for noncustodial fa-thers, our affective measures of fathering suggestpositive effects of both stepfathers and noncusto-dial fathers on child outcomes. We believe thatour research may help explain why family struc-ture measures of fathering and even behavioralmeasures such as contact or homework supervi-sion have not been shown to have a substantialeffect on child outcomes. We suggest that effec-tive parenting requires not simply the parent’spresence or even specific behaviors but an affec-tive bond between the parent and child (Astone &McLanahan, 1991). If this is true, then it is criticalthat researchers who seek to understand the typi-cally different outcomes for children raised in dif-ferent family structure begin to go beyond count-ing parents to assessing parent-child attachment.

Among the questions yet to be answered iswhy the effects of a good relationship with thenoncustodial father are weaker. One direction forfuture research is suggested by our finding thatthe effect of noncustodial fathers’ relationshipsdepends less on current contact than on yearssince father and child lived together. In our sam-

ple, the average time since the biological fatherhad lived in the same household as his child was10.4 years, and the average age of the child at thetime of separations was 4 years. This young ageat father’s leaving and the large time span sinceseparation may go a long way to explain the var-iable effects of noncustodial biological fathers. Itmay be that even a good-quality relationship witha noncustodial father has little impact on childrenwho did not live with him long enough to forman attachment. Although outside the scope of thisarticle comparing stepfathers and noncustodial fa-thers, this would be a fruitful avenue for thoseinterested in future research on noncustodial fa-thers.

This research makes a unique contribution toresearch on stepfathers and on noncustodial fa-thers by using a data set that provides comparablemeasures of children’s relationships with both fa-thers. Although the data set is cross-sectional andthe sample is small, our design is strengthened byhaving independent reporters to assess relation-ships and outcomes. The results support both the-ory and common sense expectations: Childrenbenefit from good relationships with both stepfa-thers and noncustodial fathers. Rather than dis-missing one or both of these fathers through in-complete study designs that focus only oncoresident or only on biological parents, our re-sults suggest that it is important to ask childrenabout all of their parents.

NOTE

This research was supported by Grant RO3 HD35267-01 from the National Institute for Child Health and Hu-man Development. Grateful appreciation is extended toPaul Amato and Teresa Cooney for thoughtful com-ments on a previous draft. This paper was presented atthe 1999 meetings of the American Sociological Asso-ciation.

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APPENDIX. ADOLESCENTS’ INTERNALIZING AND EXTERNALIZING PROBLEMS REGRESSED ON CHILD’S RELATIONSHIP WITH

MOTHER AND STEPFATHER

Internalizing Problems Externalizing Problems

Child’s quality of relationship with:Mother

Stepfather

2.084**(.041)

2.081**(.032)

2.079(.048)

2.061(.037)

Child’s age

Child female

Parents’ education

2.009(.012)

2.034(.051).006

(.015)

2.003*.014

2.137**(.060).008

(.018)Family income (in $10,000)

Income not reported

Parent Anglo

.007(.008)

2.216(.175).119**

(.059)

.0004(.009)

2.230(.207).112

(.070)Number of children in household

Years current union

Noncustodial father makes a financial contribution

2.002(.025)

2.012(.009)

2.064(.053)

.033(.029)

2.017(.010)

2.120*(.063)

Stepfamily cohabiting

Constant

.175**(.073)2.025(.319)

.167*(.086)2.358(.375)

Note: Ordinary least square, understandardized coefficients with standard errors in parenthesis. n 5 189.*p , .05. **p , .01, one-tailed.

Documents

When Children Have Two Fathers: Effects of Relationships With Stepfathers and Noncustodial Fathers on Adolescent Outcomes