A Decade of Voluntary Paternity Acknowledgment

OVERVIEW Starting in the mid-1990s, Wisconsin implemented policies to encourage the use of voluntary paternity acknowledgment (VPA) in cases of nonmarital births. These policies encourage the fathers of nonmarital children to acknowledge their paternity by signing and filing a form, instead of going through a judicial hearing. The motivation for these policies was the hope that reducing obstacles to establishing paternity would encourage fathers to increase financial and nonfinancial participation in their children's lives. Our earlier report on the results of these policies (Brown, Cook, and Wimer, 2004) found that this method of paternity establishment was heavily used: 48 percent of nonmarital IV-D children born in 2001 had their paternity determined through the VPA process within 6 months after birth. We also found that, although fathers established by VPA were less likely than fathers established through adjudication to have a child support order for their children, they were more likely to pay child support when they did have an order. In addition, VPA fathers were more likely to have a shared physical placement order for their children than were adjudicated fathers. These differences persisted even after controlling for other observable dissimilarities between VPA and adjudicated fathers. This report expands upon the previous report in several ways: 1. The previous report was limited to cases that had reached the child support enforcement system, but not all voluntary paternity acknowledgment cases are subject to such enforcement. Data received for this report from the Wisconsin Bureau of Vital Records on all nonmarital births in the state allow us to determine the proportion of VPA cases that enter the child support system and assess how those cases are different from VPA cases that do not. 2 2. The previous report considered only births that occurred in 2001. This report considers children from three different birth cohorts (1997, 2000, and 2005) to enable us to determine how the use of voluntary paternity acknowledgment and the associated child support outcomes have changed over time. 3. The earlier report tracked child support outcomes for a period of about two years after birth. This report tracks outcomes over a longer timeframe, providing the opportunity for additional children to have paternity established through either the VPA or adjudication process, and for child support outcomes to be observed for a longer period of time. BACKGROUND Through the 1980s and 1990s the federal government passed legislation that imposed increasing requirements on …