This thread depresses me.
I hope the bile posters here have for child support is bluster and don’t seriously believe men are getting the raw end of the financial stick in the standard ‘mom has the children’ scenario.
Heh. Reminds me of the grand jury duty I had a few years back. We did a lot of non-support cases. In one instance the custodial parent was asked if she knew of any reason her ex-husband couldn’t pay support. She said “No, but he and his new wife just bought a brand new house…” The prosecutor was VERY interested. 
Was there evidence that he did this to get out of paying support? Not an uncommon thing, BTW.
Something I DO NOT UNDERSTAND is women who REFUSE child support. I can understand not asking for it - sometimes the money would cause more problems than it would solve, for a multitude of reasons - but if he wants to pay, and she turns it down? I even know of a few cases where he wasn’t obligated to pay but sent money anyway, and she tore up the checks or even returned cash. 
The most common explanation for this is that if he’s paying support, he’s going to want to see the kids, but I thought those were entirely separate issues.
Not to a bitter ex spouse.
You think his possibly serious one is a joke, and my obvious joke is serious?
If you are good parents, then child support shouldn’t be necessary, as you’d split time and expenses. Of course in reality, it’s given and not a sign of dead-beatedness. But I assume PSXer is saying that 99/100 times the woman will receive it, and get preferred custody. I will not speculate on the righteousness of that, it’s another thread.
Alimony is a ridiculous anachronism though, IMHO.
If they don’t live in the same town, 50/50 custody isn’t going to work, and most of the time, it doesn’t anyway. From what I’ve seen, it’s nothing more than a way for a man who never showed any interest in the kids to call himself a single parent (and therefore be a chick magnet) and not have to pay support - never mind that having the kids living with you half the time is going to cost more than most support judgments. Plus, he’s going to actually have to take care of them too.
Many years ago, I worked at a clinic with a woman who was very well liked, as was her second husband, the father of her two youngest children. While I worked there, her first husband, the father of her two oldest children, sued for (and won) custody of them. She was telling everybody that he did this so he wouldn’t have to pay support any more, which didn’t make sense to me. One time, I said, “You know, we’re only getting her side of the story. Maybe something’s going on that we don’t know about” and boy, did I get raked over the coals for saying that, and it wasn’t even to her!
Cut to a couple years ago. I found out that this county puts their court records online, so I decided to see if it was on there. ZOMG yes it was! It turned out that the second husband had physically abused his stepchildren (and there was documentation a foot thick), and in the years since, she had filed multiple restraining orders against him, and for divorce three times, which was finalized at least in 2011. Those poor kids, all of them. 
And just a few months ago, I saw the second ex’s name on the police blotter; he had been arrested for selling drugs to an undercover officer.
And ITA about alimony, in most cases. I could see some nominal amount for a couple who were married for a very long time and the wife hadn’t worked for, say, 25 years, or a husband having to keep her on his health insurance for X number of months if she wouldn’t otherwise have it, but yeah, that’s a concept whose time has come and gone.
Here in Australia we have the Child Support Agency (adjunct of the Taxation Office) who are legislated to assess, initiate and collect payments on behalf of custodial parents who are in receipt of government assistance. So it’s not the money-hungry bitch/bastard c/parent who is doing the hounding for payments, it’s the government.
Except in many cases, they don’t. :rolleyes: They are toothless tigers who are supposedly hog-tied in the measures they can take to actually ***get ***any child-support arriving in the bank-account of the custodial parent.
A case in point is self-employed n/c parents.
1: As they don’t have a regular paycheck they are asked to estimate by SELF REPORTING their annual income to enable an assessment by the CSA. As you can imagine, incomes can be minimised dramatically to avoid a high assessment. They do not have to provide any bookkeeping to legitimise their assessment.*
Now, being affiliated with the Taxation Office, you’d think the CSA would be able to access previous tax returns to see whether there is any correlation between their self-reported income and their actual income. Apparently not.
And what about a case where a self-employed person hasn’t actually submitted a tax return in five years? You’d think the Australian Taxation Office might be interested in following up on this anomaly, but apparently not. Oh, and if they ever do deign to investigate, the ATO will get their tax-payments owed first before any other parties get dibs on it. :rolleyes:
2: As they don’t have a weekly salary being deposited by an employer, no monies can be garnished via that method. The CSA can apply to the n/c parent’s bank to withdraw irregular monies that are deposited, but only after the n/c parent is given four weeks notice of intent. In that time, a new bank account is set up, closing the old one, and the run-around begins again.
Oh, and the above is only attempted after much harassment of the Child Support Agency by the custodial parent. Normally such cases are immediately plonked in the Too-Hard Basket when the application first arrives at the Agency.
Yeah, I have nothing but contempt for parents who will try any method to avoid supporting their kids.**
But I’d also like to stick a firecracker up the proverbial arse of the CSA*** so that they actually perform what their charter intended. There are so many loopholes as to make the Agency utterly ineffectual, and again, it’s the kids that ultimately suffer.
Case study:
- Think of a gross income down-calculated from $150-200k pa to $40k. Means that assessed Child Support is app $300 per month (two kids)
** Think of a parent who will not baulk at spending $1000 on a weekend of hookers and blow (maybe not hookers), but gets all huffy over spending $75 per week to support his kids. Current arrears is around $4000.
*** I am not intending to actually blow up the CSA, in case any War on Terror snoops are watching. 
I have a girlfriend with shared custody and a 50/50 arrangement. Because the kids live with her ex half time (Sunday to Sunday and they live in the same school district to make this easy) she gets no child support. He makes three times what she makes. Each is responsible for food and shelter the weeks they have the kids.
But he never figures out his kids need shoes. Or school supplies. Or new jeans because they’ve grown six inches. Or someone needs to write the check for baseball. So the 50/50 support agreement is really 30/70 - because groceries aren’t the bulk of the expense with kids.
Something to keep in mind also is that many child support orders (like mine) are worked out in a settlement between parties, not just ordered by a court. I did not want to have mediation in my case because my ex is a great example of the scorpion and the frog story, but it was really pushed and I’m glad I did it. I don’t hate the system, I don’t feel he won, and it takes the wind out of his sails if he claims his support is unfair: he agreed to it voluntarily. Maybe he would have been ordered to anyway, but we privately settled, so this is an active responsibility he has.
It’s not the case all the time, but settling your case instead of letting a judge decide is something very much encouraged to keep resentment down.
You can always file a motion to modify your divorce decree. Hie thee to 800 Broadway.
Wow, isn’t that just nice. There are plenty of dads who DO want to spend time with their kids, like me. I was the one who picked up my oldest daughter after school, I’m the one who usually made dinner, I did help clean the house. Now I help out on my youngest daughter’s t-ball team, I have gone to Girl Scout meetings, I’ve taken time off work to pick them up and keep them when they’re sick.
And yet I still get told that I would only want to take them because I don’t want to pay child support. No, you’re right, I have zero interest in raising my children, not one bit.
You know why there’s a lot of guys who just give up, because there’s a lot of bullshit to put up with. My ex tells me, sometimes the night before, that one of my daughters has a birthday party the next day. Or like today, my daughter has a talent show tomorrow night. My ex moved 25 minutes away, she drives within a 5 minute detour of my house, with the kids, on Friday nights. I was told, by the mediator, that it’s unfair for her to drive 5 minutes out of her way, so I have to drive to her house, then drive home.
Then there are threads like this, where by default I’m the deadbeat dad, not wanting to do things with his kids. I can see why a lot of guys would just say fuck it, I’m done, because then the stress is gone. The courts treat you like you’re not going to pay, even when you already are. I just love the fact that because I’m being furloughed at work, if the automatic payment that’s set up doesn’t go through, I’m in court, paying a fine.
So before you go lumping all dads as deadbeat, maybe you should try walking in my shoes for a bit.
I know it’s hard for people, but I’m of the opinion that in cases where the split involves exclusively young children, the child or children should go with one parent or the other. Split living arrangements do most children no good and seem to cause hard feelings between the adults.
Kids need consistency and boundaries, we’re always told, yet it seems that 50/50 custody is becoming more common. With split living arrangements, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll have consistency across two different households. If the partners agreed that well, why would they split up? And adding new partners into the equations only makes disagreement and inconsistencies more likely.
I think the father in most cases should move on for the good of the child. If the mother remarries, it should be simpler for the stepfather to adopt. Just my opinion. Too often-- and you can see cases here, or allegations, anyway-- the child becomes a bargaining chip or another thing for embittered exes to fight over.
I’m a stepfather, in case you didn’t guess. If, and I’m not saying it ever does happen or has happened in my particular case, but if the birth father were to be slow in paying fail to pay support, I must make up the lack. However, my understanding is that I cannot get the tax break for that child, even if I was the only provider for some time.
I never pursued child support for my daughter, and had I been offered any, I would have turned it down. Her father was physically abusive to me, and there was no way I was going to risk having her spend a single second alone in his “care.” I know that visitation and child support are supposedly separate, but they are not separate in the minds of the people involved. Once someone has paid, they think they deserve to see the child and will pursue it if they wish.
I was lucky that he was just an abusive jerk, not an abusive jerk with money, so I never allowed him any visitation at all.
Let’s not forget the secondary effects of deadbeats; all divorcing fathers are assumed to be budding deadbeats who have to be strapped over a barrel and beaten, lest they not pay in the future. To say I have no deadbeat issues is a gross understatement, but from divorce through the last child turning 18 (abotut 16 years) I was guilty-until-overwhelmingly-proven-not at every turn, always, without exception. So yeah, fuck 'em dead and lock up their testicles.
This is a comically stupid opinion.
My daughter is my daughter. For nine years, I have been 50% of her support structure. I am one of only two people in the entire world that she knows will never desert her. I have taught her baseball and basketball and how to make chicken parmesan. I have been one of the two faces she saw when she woke from surgery, the person who checks her math homework every night. She has read books to me.
If her mother and I should ever part ways - and I don’t believe that will happen, but one never knows - can you possibly believe that one of her parents just “moving on,” just letting go of all of that shared history and emotion and making it absolutely clear that she can count on no one and nothing - because they might vanish because they think it’s “simpler”… can you possibly believe that would be “for the good of the child?”
Fuck no. It might be “for the good of the stepfather” who wants a tax break. But not for the child.
Whoa, are you serious? What if the kids want to see him? When I was growing up, I saw a LOT of “You have a new daddy now, so you don’t need the old one any more” kind of thing, and sometimes it was the right thing to do and sometimes it wasn’t. How would you feel if you had a son who got divorced, and you were cut off from seeing your grandchildren for no reason other than because you were a paternal relative.
Oh, yeah, I’ve had lots of women tell me that it’s best to have children without a husband, because (among other things) their biodad will be out of the picture by the time they’re in kindergarten anyway, and their real dad will come along a few years later. Sometimes it works that way, but not usually, and you also don’t get the cream of the crop of the gene pool when you do that.
In the early 1990s, the Des Moines newspaper tried printing the names of support nonpayers, and that caused more problems than it caused. Here are two examples.
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A woman wrote a letter to the paper saying that there was a man on the list who lived in the same town as her ex and had the same name that he did, and she was afraid that people would see that and think it was a man who had never missed a payment in more than 10 years. They had never met the deadbeat, but certainly knew about him because creditors would also contact her ex, thinking it was him, or a relative, KWIM?
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Another woman called up the newspaper in tears because her ex-husband’s name was on the list. Yes, it was true that he hadn’t paid support in 4 years, but he had a legitimate excuse - that’s when he died. No, the marriage hadn’t worked out, but he was the father of her children and they loved him a lot and missed him.
Most people, myself included at the time, were surprised at how many of them were women, about 10%.
(Emphasis added)
You mean I wasted over twenty years by remaining involved in my daughters’ lives after they reached kindergarten age? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
(I got the impression that one thing my ex resented was that I did remain involved. Apparently her first husband openly resented every penny and every moment he had to devote to their children, which allowed her to bond more closely with them. But I didn’t follow the playbook, and at this point our children are significantly more closely bonded with me. My bad.)
(ETA: Lest anyone get the wrong impression, neither of us ever played the children against the other. That’s just how things worked out.)
So you’re saying he was a dead deadbeat dad?
I have seen both sides of this.
I’ve met a few amazing guys who payed every dime, spent every moment, kissed and hugged and bandaged booboos, coached teams, etc. Their ex-wives sometimes raved and sometimes complained, but the guys were there for their kids and around to hear about it. (I’ve not known any women who were non-custodial parents, so I’m not referring to them. I’d bet that women were less likely to pay support if ordered to, but that’s just my WAG.)
I also have the example of my ex. He pays his support, it’s true, when child services finds out where he is working. However, he has a legal right and obligation to see his child twice a week and every other weekend. Know how many times he saw his daughter from age 8 months until age 3? 8. Eight times. With me calling, inviting him to get her, and inviting him and his girlfriend to dinner, and asking about christmas, father’s day, etc. I made sure he got gifts from his daughter, even when he didn’t reciprocate. I tell his daughter, and his friends, and his parents, that daddy loves her, and he’s a good guy who’s just a little busy. He’s told his whole family that I’m the one who won’t let him see his little girl. When he finally came over, he spent five minutes and left, saying he’d “done his duty”. I finally moved out of the area for unavoidable reasons, with his knowledge and WRITTEN CONSENT, and he threatened to have the police bring her back. (Written consent, notarized, trumps a phone call any day. Keep diligent records, and get everything in writing.) Since I left, he’s changed his number, won’t respond to email, and missed Christmas and her birthday without a gift or call or anything. He sure cashed the check mailed to him for Christmas, though. In case you’re wondering, no I don’t want him back, I’m not trying to do that. I have my own, separate life, with my own companionship.
I know that 85% of non-custodial parents (male and female) support their kids, financially, emotionally, and every other which way. However, there’s that 15% that don’t. Some of those are probably deceased, but the rest of them just maybe need to be given a wake-up call of varying severity.