Out of touch

While ethnic minority children today experience parental separation almost as often as majority Danish children, research on how they experience divorce is limited. Hence, this article applies a mixed methods approach to investigate post-divorce father–child contact for ethnic minority children compared to Danish majority peers. Drawing on survey data, the article documents how ethnic minority children are more likely than their majority Danish peers to have either no contact with their fathers or see their fathers for shorter durations. Drawing on qualitative interviews with adult and child members of post-divorce ethnic minority families, we propose that the observed differences in post-divorce father–child contact can result from the lower socio-economic position of the members of such families, be tied to higher thresholds for divorcing, and arise from different understandings of the role of the father in the ethnic minorities’ home country cultures as compared to the Danish host society.