Men without college degrees have lost economic ground in recent decades. They are also experiencing growing social isolation, with lower employment rates, fewer friends, less social engagement and weakening family life.

Family law is an underappreciated cause of this social isolation, as we argue in a new article for the Columbia Law Review. For higher-income parents, who are mostly married, the family courts have moved away from adversarial procedures toward a supportive system that promotes two-parent involvement following divorce.

But that system is largely beyond the reach of men without college degrees, partly because they are less likely to marry, and therefore to divorce, and partly because their encounters with the family law system often result in punitive and counter-productive child support orders.

The family class divide

The result of these trends is a growing class divide. The law helps more affluent couples craft “post-divorce” families that emphasize the role of both parents. For most men without college degrees, family law is punitive and moralistic, exacerbating the isolation of men in their families and undermining their place as caregivers.

There is a stark class gap at the family formation stage, too, in part the result of diverging economic fortunes. Most women (78%) say they will not marry a man who does not have a steady job and low-income men, even if they are employed, are more likely to be in precarious jobs with little security. In addition, men without college degrees engage in higher rates of substance use and intimate partner violence, which contribute to the fragility of adult relationships.

It should not be a surprise, then, that many of these men often have children in the context of short-term, contingent relationships. At the outset, most signal a desire for involvement: more than 80% of unmarried fathers provide support while the mother is pregnant and visit her and the child in the hospital. A high percentage sign a voluntary acknowledgment of parentage at the hospital, which establishes the man as the legal father.

But by the time children turn five, two out of three nonmarital children are no longer living with their father. This is typically because the mother tells her partner to leave, and a significant percentage of these children have no contact of any kind with their fathers. There are race gaps: unmarried Black fathers have more contact with children than nonresidential white and Hispanic fathers, at least while the children are young. For all groups, however, father contact falls off as the children grow older, with Black-white racial differences growing smaller by the time the children reach age nine, and Hispanic fathers lagging even farther behind.

A major factor in declining father involvement is the quality of the co-parenting relationship with the mother; the ability of parents to work together is a strong predictor of paternal engagement. Unsurprisingly given their greater overall involvement, Black fathers report stronger ties with the mothers than white and Hispanic fathers, though the quality of these relationships also deteriorate as the children grow older.

The rise of post-divorce families

This pattern of weakening paternal ties to children after a break-up was once true of divorcing families too. But a revolution in family law has remade the separation process, encouraging shared custody, mandating parental education, designing parenting plans that accommodate varying parental needs, providing counseling and other services, and making available alternative dispute resolution techniques such as mediation and custody coordinators.

These services, however, are unavailable to those who do not go to court; and unmarried couples typically dissolve their relationships without any judicial involvement at all. Moreover, to the extent that unmarried fathers, particularly those without college degrees, end up in court, it is most commonly because of a child support proceeding, often one initiated by the state. These proceedings affect 20% of American children, with Black children twice as likely as white children to be the subject of such child support lawsuits.

In parent-initiated proceedings, the couple controls the outcomes, and the parents can trade custody and support rights to meet their respective needs, as many jurisdictions reduce the support obligations of fathers who assume greater residential time with their children. Unmarried fathers who remain involved with their children often do contribute in a variety of informal ways, but receive no credit for their contributions in state-initiated proceedings.

In addition, because family courts assume that unemployed parents can earn standardized incomes, the courts frequently impose unrealistic support obligations that the fathers cannot pay and that are difficult to modify. The results often alienate fathers, locking them in debt, pushing them away from their families, and undermining further involvement. The system thus operates in punitive and counterproductive ways.

Solution: community-based family centers

Other countries and some American states have experimented with more supportive arrangements. Specifically, they have established family centers that encourage fathers to be more involved in their children’s lives and marshal the resources necessary to help families overcome the obstacles to that involvement. The systematic creation of such community-based centers can be an important step toward overcoming fathers’ social isolation and providing more emotional and material support for children.

Australia has pioneered the use of family relationship centers that operate outside the court system and combine family dispute resolution services with employment, counseling, and other assistance that meets families where they are. Some American communities have now adopted pilot programs tailored to meet the needs of lower-income fathers and change the trajectories of their family involvement. An example is the New York City-based Family Enrichment Centers. Launched in 2017, these centers are based on a “primary prevention model,” designed to create a welcoming space where families can obtain resources such as clothing and food donations, meet and develop relationships with other families and community members, and share knowledge with each other through programs such as “Parent Cafés,” where parents come together in small, informal groups to discuss topics related to parenting and child rearing. These centers can take a variety of forms, but they share certain key features:

• First, they are community-based, and thus able to assist families with different norms and different cultural assumptions.

• Second, the centers provide integrated services. They often address employment, housing, and mental health needs that are critical to healthy family functioning.

• Third, these centers encourage voluntary resolutions compared to judicial proceedings that are often coercive and difficult for low-income families to navigate. Unmarried fathers report frustration at the obstacles they encounter to greater involvement with their children, including mothers’ opposition; mothers indicate that they would like greater father involvement – if the men can address the behavioral issues that led to the break-up. Supportive centers help family members work together to resolve these tensions, whether by supplying job assistance and mental health counseling or by helping the couple adopt creative solutions that address their mutual concerns.

Centers such as these report success in increasing father involvement. They also provide a place for families in crisis to go for assistance in meeting a variety of needs and working through different types of conflicts. In the process, they address the social isolation that has become an increasing feature of male alienation.

Family law is fueling the class gap in family life, which is damaging the most economically vulnerable communities, weakening relationships between children and fathers, and failing millions of men. It’s time for reform.

June Carbone

University of Minnesota Law School

Clare Huntington

Columbia Law School