In my jurisdiction (Ontario), pretty much everything other than trials can be done via teleconference when it is impractical for a party to travel. We also have a ratification regime in place that permits orders to be made in one county/district and transferred to another county/district for ratification. On a broader scale, we have interjurisdictional support order agreements with other jurisdiction (nationally and internationally through our Interjurisdictional Support Orders Act, which is in some ways similar to your UISFA) to make both enforcement and variation easier for the parties; enforcement is usually performed by a government agency, and variation usually uses a ratification process.
That being said, at its most basic level, once a person is responsible for child support, it behoves that person keep on top of things by bringing variation motions early on rather than letting things slip.
Not the mom. Not the dad. Not the extended family.
That’s a concept that a lot of child support payors do not grok when they assume that child support should be tied directly to access.
The simple fact of the matter is that if access is buggered up by the custodial parent, it is the child who will suffer if child support is held back. The remedy must be one that gets access back on track without harming the child.
One thing not mentioned is that whoever has the kids before going to court usually keeps them after. If dad moves into an apartment and leaves mom and kids behind, he’s unlikely to get custody. Same thing for mom. The best interest of the child is often to not upset the status quo, so they usually stay with their parent they’re with. As my attorney said “We may be talking about a kid, but possession is still 9/10ths of the law.”
I’m not displeased nor was I then. When I left the state where the order was entered, it was to accept a better (higher paying) job. The company that hired me went belly up and I was unemployed and had no income other than unemployment compensation. I had lengthy communications with the child support enforcement agency in the original state; I succeeded in getting them to temporarily suspend my payments . When I did find another job with a good salary, I immediately resumed making my payments and was allowed to continue making them for two extra years in order to pay off my arrears. In my experience, the deck was stacked against me insofar as getting a reduction in the amount I had to pay. I don’t find my grievance to be at all silly but of course YMMV.
I am indeed referring to a support case from about three decades ago. I obtained the best advice I could and followed that advise as closely as possible.
I’m talking about men who were fairly denied custody.
Mothers tend to have a closer relationship with their children than fathers do. The price of this is that they don’t work as hard (even when working “full time”) and make less money. There is an enormous amount of attention and energy that modern society puts into making sure that women bear as little of the consequences of their lack of professional effort as possible. There is zero effort put into making sure that men don’t suffer the consequences of their being primarily focused on earning.
It plays itself out in divorce situations. The woman who has the primary parenting role is therefore granted primary custody (& everything else that goes with it). The man who has the primary earning role is not granted anything for this. To the contrary, he gets added responsibility, and thus loses both family relationships and authority over his own income and work/life balance. No one says “we’re giving primary custody to the wife because she had the main parenting role, but we’re giving most of the money to the husband because he had the main financial role”. And no one says “the fact that the husband is now screwed in terms of his relationship with his children while the wife is not means that maybe we don’t need to make so sure that they are absolutely equal in everything else”.
So net-net, the husband has the short end of the stick. The wife gets the relationship with the kids and legal rights to the same standard of living as the husband. The husband gets a requirement to work to support his ex-wife and kids, and the right to get jerked around if he wants to maintain any sort of relationship.
There was a pair of documentaries on CBC radio (Canadian Broacasting Corp.) about 10 or 15 years ago. I caught the seocnd one, which peripherally mentioned the first.
A young couple in Alberta split up, and the man went to Toronto for work. She got a court order for about $1000/month. Based on typical unskilled worker wages back then, that was a LOT of money, especially for 1 child. The woman was featured on a “bad deadbeat dads -tsk, tsk” documentary about how the guy had left and never paid his support, and she was living on welfare.
The next documentary was about “Bad Alberta, stealing poor parents’ money!”, editorializing on the couple’s circumstances. He came back, they reconciled and he got a job. Alberta, which had been paying his ex welfare, was now garnisheeing his (their) income to repay the back debt, 2 or 3 years worth.
the moral being that while there are stereotypical deadbeats and such, most guys are responsible.
Interesting court case a few years ago in Ontario, a judge ordered a mother to surrender custody of her children to the father because she had engaged in “parental alientation”, poisoning their minds against the father.
I also recall a case about 20 years ago, where a baseball player in the $1M/year category had been ordered by a judge to pay alimony as if he were earning the money, even though he chose to sit out the season so as to have a zero income.
I wonder how much you can “force” someone to earn to their potential if they choose not to? Can you be held in contempt for telling someone in an interview “I’m only applying for a job because the judge ordered me to”? I do know of someone who was told “just because you are on strike for 3 months earning $35/week does not exempt you from paying the full child support ($900/month) during that time”.
In Ontario, the judge can impute whatever income is reasonable in the judge’s opinion, based on the evidence submitted. In other words, if a person is making a decent wage, but then stops earning as much upon separation, there had better be as darn good reason, otherwise the judge will order that person to pay support as if he or she were still making the previous income.
Parental alienation is a hot issue these days. I picked up an inter-provincial case and an international case this week – both turning on parental alienation.
Unfortunately, parents who alienate their children from the other parent tend to be nutters, and parents who alienate themselves from their own children tend to be nutters, which makes such cased very hard on decent parents who have to deal with such troubled exes.
Ummm, where are you getting this from? My BIL did exactly that - he was a mortgage officer earning some really nice commission checks, until the housing market collapsed. He didn’t start the process in motion right away, and was in arrears for a while, but finally did go in and get his CS support order modified to reflect the reality that no matter how hard he tried (and he did try, believe me), he was not likely to earn in crash times what he did in boom times. And he did it without a lawyer.
Then I’m not sure I understand you. Is it a serious consequence for fathers who want custody to be denied custody because it is fairly adjudged to be in the child’s best interests to live with the mother instead? Sure it’s serious, but it’s not a raw deal for the father if he wasn’t treated unfairly by the court.
Likewise, if a mother loses custody for denying visitation rights as Oakminster described, that’s a serious consequence for her too. But it’s not a raw deal, because she wasn’t treated unfairly: losing custody was a direct consequence of her own misbehavior in opposition to what the court had decided was in her child’s best interests.
Your last sentence there contradicts your claim in the first two. If mothers are earning less money because they’re working less hard than fathers, then they obviously are bearing the “consequences of their lack of professional effort”.
As a rule, if you work less hard (by cutting down on your hours, taking unpaid leave, taking a less responsible position with less overtime, or any other of the myriad ways that workers try to free up more time for their non-work obligations), you make less money. That’s the standard consequence of working less hard.
So no, by your own assertion, modern society isn’t shielding mothers from the natural consequences of reducing their efforts professionally in order to devote more effort to parenting.
Again, the actual data on post-divorce income changes for men and women seems to contradict the conclusion you’re trying to draw here. On average, men after divorce do end up with higher incomes than they previously had, while women’s incomes drop. As described in a recent study,
That study drew specifically on data from the UK and Europe, but there are similar results from studies in Canada and the US.
Net-net, the actual evidence doesn’t seem to bear out your assertion. Yes, husbands on average spend more time at work than wives and consequently have less involvement in homemaking and parenting. However, on average, husbands earn more income before divorce and have more money after divorce than wives do.
So, on average, both partners seem to be reaping the consequences of a fairly predictable trade-off between income and family. Naturally, many individual cases will vary widely from this average outcome.
I’m not about to quibble about the difference between “serious consequence” and “raw deal”. The point is that he loses out, as compared to the mother.
Not really. Because while they’re married, they share in their husband’s income. And after divorce, they do as well. The father doesn’t get any extra advantage financially for being the guy that actually brings in the money, in the way that the mother gets extra advantage socially for being the one who actually cares for the kids.
I’ve discussed these studies in a prior thread. All these studies are bogus and are rigged to draw the conclusions that they draw, and this is done primarily by defining “income” in misleading manners. In particular, the Jenkins study that you quoted did not deduct child support payments from the income of fathers when comparing incomes of divorced mothers and fathers see footnote 10. Considering the standard child support formulas, it’s hard to imagine that an omission as glaring as this was done without the intention of skewing the results. And most of the other studies similarly rig the comparisons by omitting things of this sort (and/or welfare payments, taxes etc.)
And certainly the law does not specifically allow for the higher earning person to retain a higher standard of living based on the fact that they actually earn the money, in the way that it allows for the person with the more hands on caring role to retain control of the familial relationships on that basis. So at the most, you’re only claiming that the law falls short of its intention to discriminate in this manner.
But I don’t accept any of these studies, as above, and I look around and see the lifestyles of a lot of people after divorces and I don’t see any noticeable disparity between men and women. There are cases of men living better than women but there are also quite a lot of cases of women living better than men. (See Edward the Head’s thread about his own circumstances, for a local example.)
[This is especially the case when you factor in cases of imputed income, as discussed by others in this thread, or cases where the husband has to make up for falling behind during temporary job loss - no one makes up to him the income that he lost during that time.
Child support and alimony are sacred in this country and are among the only debts that are not discharged in bankruptcy, so if a guy loses all his money, he suffers and his other creditors suffer, but his ex-wife and children are shielded.]
So? AFAICT, that study doesn’t deduct child-related expenses from the incomes of mothers either when making that comparison. I don’t see what should be considered unfair or “rigged” about that.
Are you trying to argue that the earned income a father spends on his children somehow shouldn’t count as really “his own” income, whereas the earned income a mother spends on her children should be counted as part of her own income?
If so, why? Do you feel that a father’s child support payments don’t truly qualify as part of the father’s own money, because the court has ordered him to earmark that amount for the use of his children? Whereas a mother’s spending her own income on her children, on the contrary, shouldn’t be “deducted” in assessing the amount of her income, because her spending is in some way more “voluntary” than the father’s?
If so, that really doesn’t sound very persuasive to me. Parents, both mothers and fathers, earn income and spend a large percentage of that income on their kids, which is as it should be, IMO. I don’t see why we should assess that spending differently in evaluating income amounts, based merely on whether or not the spending is an officially mandated child support payment.
I would hope that all caring fathers, and mothers too, would and do willingly chip in their child support expenditures for the benefit of their own children. Not begrudge it as money “taken away” from “their own” incomes that they should have been entitled to spend exclusively on themselves.
It doesn’t do it in its definition of income, but it effectively does it in scaling income by family size (using the “McLements scale”). The children are all attributed to the custodial parent, i.e. the mother. See page 4 of the study.
My twins father and his new girlfriend played tag team threat while discussing him watching the twins so I could work. Threats included him quiting his job to work nder the table to him paying a Dr. To say he was clinically depressed and unable to work, to them leaving the state to prevent his possible arrest. What is a mother to do in a case like this? Took the emails to family court and filed a complaint. Do men like this see jail time? Was told I had to wait till he didn’t meet his monthly obligation before I could file for enforcment.
I have a question … how do the courts determine if a parent in UNABLE to pay? Their word? What proof is required to show unability to earn income?
I ask this because … drumroll… I have a deadbeat EX who has been goofing off for the last couple years - playing like a college kids (he’s 42) and basically threw his reputation as a State Certified General Contractor down the drain… his former well know business is now anything but reputable in our smallish community of snowbirds. Therefore he ‘can’t find work’ - so he says. He has been court ordered to pay child support for our two children in the amount of $800 ish per month… so far since Oct. 2011 he has been late for every payment by weeks if not well into the next month then in May he stopped all together until late in June and he has made 4 - $100 payments (with our settlement in the divorce + childsupport = it’s about $1000 per month). so as of right now he is $2600 in the rears