This chapter reviews our findings about associations between money, love and young children’s well-being and the status of policies and programs that affect the financial and emotional support resident and nonresident fathers provide for their children. We review the status of policies and programs in four domains: transfer payments, child support enforcement, healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood). These reviews provide a context for changes we will recommend in Chapter 8 in these four policy domains.

Given our findings about how money and love are associated with young children’s well-being, this chapter develops recommendations to Congress that would (1) increase financial support to resident and nonresident families by making the temporary changes to transfer programs permanent; (2) increase the focus of healthy and marriage programs on improving child well-being; (3) provide coparenting relationship education to eligible responsible fatherhood program graduates and their coparenting partners and increase the focus on improving child well-being; and (4) incorporate informal financial support or right-sized child support orders for nonresident fathers lacking recent, stable employment experience and parenting-time orders into standard child-support enforcement policy.

This chapter describes new analysis we conducted to address the question about how money and love matters for children’s development. Because children also have a say in their own development, we also include in our analysis, their contribution via key child characteristics. Most of the literature reviewed for this book addresses either the money story OR the love story (mostly mothers), but rarely, if ever, includes the entire family system. We find empirical support that both – love and money – matters as well as children’s early skills and lay out implications of these findings for research, policy, and programs.