Researchers M. Muchemwa and C. Odimegwu, both based in the Demography and Population Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, drew on the National Income Dynamics Study, or NIDS, a nationally representative panel survey that has tracked thousands of South Africans across five waves between 2008 and 2017. From a pooled dataset of more than 28,000 male person-wave observations, the authors isolated 718 observations from 636 men who reported making cash contributions to children living outside their households. Because the same men were surveyed repeatedly over nearly a decade, the researchers turned to a statistical technique designed for exactly this kind of repeated-measures data: generalized estimating equations, or GEE.

The methodological choices in the study are worth unpacking, because they shape what the numbers actually mean. Child maintenance payments are continuous monetary amounts that are strongly right-skewed, meaning most men pay modest sums while a few pay very large ones. To model such data, the authors specified a Gamma distribution with a log link function, a combination that ensures predicted payments remain positive and expresses coefficients as multiplicative, or percentage, effects rather than absolute changes in rands. Because repeated observations from the same individual violate the independence assumption underlying ordinary regression, the GEE framework explicitly models the within-person correlation across survey waves. Three candidate correlation structures were compared using the quasi-likelihood under the independence model criterion, and the unstructured structure, which allows the correlation to differ between every pair of waves, produced the lowest QIC value of 14,483.032 and was retained for the final analysis.

The headline result is stark: race, age, occupation and income were all significantly associated with the amount of child maintenance paid, even after controlling for education, employment status, marital status, debt, socioeconomic status, health, religion, province and household size. Indian and White fathers paid significantly more than Black fathers, with a regression coefficient of 1.0542 that was significant at the one percent level and consistent across all three correlation specifications. Age mattered too, with men aged 53 to 57 paying more than younger men aged 18 to 28. And income emerged as a powerful driver: the Gamma model with a log link indicates that every additional 1,000 rand in household net income was associated with roughly a 3.4 percent increase in the amount paid, a coefficient of 0.0000345 that held at the one percent significance level.

One counterintuitive finding deserves attention. Men in unskilled occupations paid an estimated 44.8 percent more than men with no occupation at all, after adjusting for other characteristics. This suggests that having any foothold in the labour market, even at the lowest rung, enables financial contribution in a way that complete joblessness does not. It also hints at the psychological dimension of the provider role: men in work may feel a stronger sense of obligation and capability, while unemployed fathers, unable to meet deeply entrenched social expectations of provision, may withdraw altogether. Previous South African research has documented how feelings of failure and emasculation push men away from their children, and how mothers or maternal families sometimes deny fathers access when they cannot provide material support.

The racial pattern in the data cannot be divorced from South Africa’s history. The authors interpret their findings through the father involvement framework first proposed by Michael Lamb and colleagues in 1985, which decomposes fatherhood into three dimensions: interaction, availability and responsibility. Child maintenance payments serve here as an observable indicator of the responsibility dimension, the father’s role in ensuring that the child’s needs are met. Within this framework, the racial gap in payments reflects structural inequalities that constrain some fathers’ capacity to enact financial responsibility. Black fathers in South Africa remain disproportionately affected by unemployment, labour migration and economic marginalisation, legacies that limit both their financial capacity and their ability to maintain consistent involvement in their children’s lives. Yet the authors are careful to note that money is not the whole story: even wealthy Black fathers have faced legal action for non-payment, indicating that willingness, relational dynamics and enforcement all shape behaviour independently of capacity.

The age gradient tells a complementary story about life stage. Older men are more likely to have accumulated resources, achieved employment stability and internalised the social expectations attached to responsible fatherhood, enabling them to fulfil the responsibility dimension of involvement. Younger men, still transitioning into stable economic and social roles, may lack both the means and the readiness to assume this responsibility. Comparable findings from Finland, where a register-based study showed older parents paying higher maintenance amounts even after adjusting for income, suggest the pattern is not unique to South Africa but reflects a broader developmental logic of paternal responsibility.

The study’s technical rigour is matched by an unusually candid discussion of its limitations. The NIDS Contributions Given module does not distinguish between court-ordered formal maintenance and informal, non-regulated support, so the analysis captures all reported financial transfers to children rather than legal compliance specifically. More importantly, respondents who reported no contribution to anyone outside their household were never asked about non-resident children, making it impossible to identify fathers who should pay but do not. The analysis therefore describes the payment amounts among observed contributors, not the probability of paying. The sample was also unbalanced, with 559 men contributing a single observation, 72 contributing two and only five contributing three, and the racial comparison rests on just 23 Indian or White respondents against 620 African respondents, limiting the precision of that comparison. A sensitivity analysis using an inverse hyperbolic sine transformation, which allowed five zero-payment observations to be retained, confirmed the robustness of the positive associations for race, income, age and survey year.

What emerges from this study is a picture of child maintenance in South Africa as a dynamic, evolving behaviour rather than a static obligation. Payments were significantly higher in 2012, 2015 and 2017 than in the 2008 baseline wave, suggesting that financial contributions have grown over time even as the underlying inequalities persist. The policy implications are concrete: the authors call for programmes that improve employment opportunities, awareness campaigns that emphasise the importance of fathers’ financial contributions, and community-based fatherhood initiatives, including counselling and parenting workshops, that engage absent fathers and address the cultural and economic barriers that keep them from supporting their children. With evidence that only 40.5 percent of children with living fathers receive financial support from them, the stakes of translating these statistical insights into action could hardly be higher, both for the millions of children whose wellbeing depends on paternal support and for a society still reckoning with the structural forces that shape who gets to be a provider.

Subject of Research: Demographic and socioeconomic determinants of child maintenance payments among men in South Africa

Article Title: Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of men paying child maintenance in South Africa: a generalized estimating equation approach

Article References: Muchemwa, M., & Odimegwu, C. (2026). Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of men paying child maintenance in South Africa: a generalized estimating equation approach. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 480. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01739-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01739-4

Keywords: child maintenance, child support, fatherhood, South Africa, National Income Dynamics Study, generalized estimating equations, longitudinal analysis, father absence, income inequality, race and ethnicity, social policy, demography

The study, titled “Daughters promote pair-bonding in fathers in modern Western cultures,” draws on a body of prior work showing that fathers play an outsized role in the development of their daughters’ self-esteem and in shaping their broader expectations about men’s reliability and availability in long-term relationships. Building on that literature, the Rutgers team formulated a specific hypothesis: if fathers matter so much for how daughters come to view male investment, then the presence of a daughter might itself increase a father’s tendency to favor and display long-term commitment, effectively signaling to the child that male investment in a partnership is dependable. In other words, the researchers suspected that men might behave differently as partners depending on whether they are raising a boy or a girl, and that the direction of that difference would favor daughters.

To test the idea, the scholars conducted three separate surveys of nearly 1,700 parents across the United States, a sample size large enough to give the question a genuinely representative test rather than a laboratory curiosity. The design was deliberately layered so that each survey addressed a potential weakness of the previous one. The first survey asked fathers of daughters under the age of 18 to rate the quality of their relationship with the child’s mother, capturing the men’s own reports of attachment, commitment, trust and intimacy. Because self-reports can be inflated, the researchers then reversed the perspective entirely.

In the second survey, the team asked mothers of daughters to describe their perception of the fathers’ behaviors. This step mattered because a father’s own account of being a devoted partner could reflect optimism or self-presentation as much as reality. When the mothers’ perceptions aligned with the fathers’ self-reports, the researchers had converging evidence from two independent observers of the same relationship, and the pattern again pointed in the same direction: fathers of daughters were seen, by both themselves and their partners, as more attentive and committed.

The third survey was designed to address the most serious remaining alternative explanation, namely that men who choose to have daughters, or who already hold particular views about relationships and gender, might simply differ from men who have sons before any child is born. To rule out pre-existing differences, the researchers recruited soon-to-be parents during the last trimester of pregnancy and phrased their questions to determine whether differences in fathers’ behavior were already present before birth or whether they emerged only after the child arrived and the sex became known. This longitudinal framing allowed the team to separate the effect of having a daughter from the effect of the kind of man who happens to have one.

The results, the researchers report, were striking. “Fathers of daughters are not necessarily better dads, but they are perceived, both individually and by the child’s mother, as better at being there for their partner,” said Krystal Duarte, a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Women in Business and lead author of the study. The distinction she draws is an important one for interpreting the finding. The study does not claim that fathers of daughters parent better or love their children more; it identifies a specific shift in how men engage with their co-parent, a shift visible in self-reports and in the perceptions of the mothers themselves.

“Having a daughter appears to be protective of the primary parent relationship,” said Kristina Durante, professor and research fellow at the Center for Women in Business and a coauthor of the study. “When men have daughters, it alters their psychologies in interesting ways, including, as we found, higher levels of commitment to the mother.” The word “protective” is doing careful work here: given that the transition to parenthood is widely associated with strain on couples, a factor associated with stronger attachment and intimacy in fathers runs against the general trend and may help buffer the parental relationship during a vulnerable period.

Why the effect exists remains an open question, and Duarte and Durante are explicit that their explanations are theories rather than settled conclusions. One leading account centers on what fathers teach their daughters, sometimes without intending to. “Fathers are often a daughter’s first close look at what to expect from a man in a relationship,” said Duarte. “If a father is showing up for the child’s mother, being attentive, supportive, committed, that becomes the daughter’s working model for what a good partner looks like. We think dads may be, in effect, coaching their daughters on what to expect and what not to settle for, just by how they treat mom.” On this view, the heightened commitment is a form of instruction delivered through behavior rather than words, and it connects directly to earlier findings that fathers shape daughters’ expectations about men’s reliability.

Other candidate mechanisms are physiological and cultural. The researchers note that fatherhood is known to be associated with declines in testosterone, which may trigger endocrine shifts that facilitate caregiving behavior and motivation for pair-bonding. But they point out that this hormonal change would apply to fathers of sons as well as fathers of daughters, so biology alone cannot explain the sex-specific pattern. Daughters, they suggest, may also evoke cultural norms surrounding protection, alter perceived family vulnerability within the household, or shift relational expectations between the couple in ways that sons do not. Any of these routes could plausibly nudge fathers of daughters toward more visible investment in the partnership.

The explanation the authors favor, however, looks less at what fathers need and more at what daughters stand to gain. “Relationships are enormously beneficial to men, but historically they’ve been especially critical for women,” said Durante. “A father who’s actively working at his own partnership is showing his daughter that this kind of investment from a man is possible, and worth expecting.” Framed this way, the pair-bonding effect is best understood as an adaptive alignment of interests: a father whose daughter observes a reliable, committed model of male investment is a father whose daughter is likely to expect, and presumably secure, comparable investment in her own adult relationships. The method of research was a survey, the subjects were people, and the authors declare no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work. Whether the pattern extends beyond modern Western populations, where the study was conducted, is a question the researchers and their colleagues will now need to test in other cultural settings.

Subject of Research: Effects of having daughters on fathers' pair-bonding and relationship commitment

Article Title: Dads of daughters may be more attentive partners

Article References: Dads of daughters may be more attentive partners. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: fatherhood, daughters, pair-bonding, relationship commitment, parenting, attachment, Personality and Individual Differences, Rutgers Business School, evolutionary psychology, family dynamics, testosterone, survey research