Your mind instinctually tries to parse these relationships, and it takes a minute to see what the relationship between the speaker, the subject and the child is. With “baby daddy,” it’s immediately clear that the relationship between the speaker and the subject is being purposefully kept ambiguous beyond “we had a kid together.”
It’s like SO or Ms., in that it quickly reduces what is probably a complex situation into the aspect that is relevant at the moment.
The truth? Too respectful.
I said that the partner who put the other one through school SHOULD have a legal claim to part of the higher income. As far as I know, it’s not the law now. I just think it SHOULD be, because without the supporting partner, the doctor or lawyer would either not be able to go to school at all, or would have had a much rougher time managing it. I think of this sort of thing as a joint investment.
Most women do not want a divorce. They want the abuse, addiction, and affairs to stop. And, unfortunately, sometimes they think the only way to stop it is through a divorce. The term affair does not apply after divorce but the threats, lies and harassment continues.
[quote=“Manda_JO, post:99, topic:619551”]
In this hypothetical, are the parents living a lavish lifestyle while they dress their kids in goodwill and feed them beans and rice? If so, that doesn’t happen, or happens vanishingly, freakishly rarely. The general idea that kids are supported at the same lifestyle as their parents (broadly speaking) is pretty damn near universal.
It’s much more common than it should be. Unfortunately, it is typical that one parent continues (usually) his lavish lifestyle and the stay-at-home (usually) mom scrapes by. Especially when the high wage earner is self- employed and now decides it is “his” income. Although before they were married they had no money or children. When he decides to divorce it’s now “his” income and “his” children. And he hires an arsenal of lawyers, forensic accountants, and CPAs to hide his income, embellish his write offs and commit fraud. He then commits perjury and doesn’t really care because even though he was fined $50,000 for doing so - it’s still cheaper for him. And the (usually) mom who has no resources and is emotionally and financially devastated gives in because she is trying to hold some semblance of a family together while he travels around the world with his new young girlfriend.
My sister didn’t want a divorce. However, she didn’t want to stay married to a man who swore that he wasn’t cheating on her, but continued to do so. Since he had a vasectomy, he saw no reason to use a condom when he was cheating, and he got infected and brought it home to her.
She’s the one who filed for divorce, but I’d say that he’s the one who caused the divorce.
So, just cap the amount as the OP suggested. Solves that problem right away.
Because before the divorce, the high earner was under no obligation to provide private schools or nanny service. He (or she) could have stopped those at any time if he felt that it was in the best interest of his child, or just because he became an asshole.
But now, and ONLY because he had the audacity to get a divorce, the state will now impose its own standards for parenting instead of his own decision. He hasn’t been judged an unfit parent, but the state will mandate how much he has to spend on his child. I don’t understand why more people aren’t outraged at such an intrusion into something so private and personal.
And, as mentioned above, the custodial parent can take that child support, and still give the kids a 2 bedroom house, public school, and camping vacations and spend the rest on a car for her new boyfriend. If the state actually cared about children maintaining the current lifestyle, then why don’t they mandate that the money goes to the child and enforce such?
I had an interesting conversation yesterday with an old friend I’d fallen out of touch with. She’s on Disability, due to mental illness so severe that she’s hospitalized about every 8 weeks to manage her symptoms and keep her safe. Her disability checks, and those for her 3 children, go directly to her husband, as she’s been declared unfit to manage her own finances.
Twice a year (I think she said it was), her husband needs to fill out a form stating what the funds were used for. Housing, meals, clothing, etc., and the rest of it has to be accounted for as “savings”, with copies of bank statements on request.
So…tell me again how it’s too complicated for the court to request accountability for expenditures for a family member?
Because someone taking care of their spouse has no reason to make everything a royal pain in the ass. Two parents goi g through a bitter divorce do. The money spent by the taxpayers mediating these disputes will create a bigger problem than the “problem” it is trying to solve.
It wouldn't be, if it was a form going to the court twice a year listing how much was spent on housing, food, clothing , etc. But the impression I've gotten (both here and IRL) is that that's not good enough. The support-paying parent wants the custodial parent to be accountable to him/her on a weekly or monthly basis , not to the court a couple of times a year. And a simple form wouldn't suffice. It's not enough to say that it costs $200 a month to feed the kids- they want the receipt for every box of cereal, and want to be able to question why the CP is buying Kellogg's instead of the store brand. Some of the electric bill should be attributed to the kids? You can't prove how much so that shouldn't be considered. Same goes for gas for the car. Those disputes are what will make it a nightmare
I won’t speak for any other poster, but I don’t advocate a receipt for every box of cereal or an argument about whether gas money to the movies was a child or parent expense. This isn’t a novel concept. If you say that it cost $100 to feed your 6 year old last month, that’s presumptively reasonable. If you say it cost $2000 last month to feed your 6 year old, then you need to justify that.
The IRS demands that for deductions. Why shouldn’t the non-custodial parent have a minimum level of assurance that his child support actually…supports his child?
Imagine an IRS audit spearheaded by your ex. Sounds really fun and efficient, huh?
If you are so concerned about how your money is being spent, you have the option to take custody and spend it yourself. If you expect someone else to raise your kid, you can’t expect to also have much of a say in how that kid is raised.
No, oftentimes you really, really don’t. Because it’s not often in the best interests of the child to move him to a new household, so judges are really loathe to make physical custody changes, especially if we’re talking 100% physical custody in one home where the child has spent a lot of time and the custodial parent isn’t looking for a change. I’d like to find a citation for even one case where a working custody arrangement was changed at the request of the non-custodial parent simply because s/he didn’t want to pay child support.
I think the people who would spend “taxpayer money” (by which I assume you mean making their lawyers rich, because these protracted things don’t often get pro bono lawyers or taxpayer supported ones) arguing over pennies are already clogging up the courts with complaints and accusations, only they currently have no evidence to support or refute their allegations, so it becomes a long game of “he said she said.”
I realize that I’ve already said this multiple times, and that you must have seen it, so you must be ignoring it because you don’t like it, not because you need it explained again, but there is an answer to this question:
“He” doesn’t get to apply his own standard for parenting because he is no longer parenting. It is no more complex than that. He’s allowed to have his rules for how much of his own money a kid needs to grow up in the world, and the state he lives in has its own rules, too. When he’s in charge of raising the kids, his rules apply. When the state is by necessity making decisions about the kids’ welfare, the state’s rules apply. Any other scheme would be ridiculous. “This court finds that Mr. Jones raised his children one percent more extravagantly than he needed to to avoid prosecution for neglect. Accordingly, the children will continue to be raised exactly one percent better than hobo children.”
If anything, your argument, if it were put into practice, would lead to more intrusion into married parents’ parenting practices, not less. States have already determined what they think is a reasonable standard of living for a given economic situation. If you think it’s unfair that courts start applying that standard at divorce, the solution would be to start applying it earlier, not to start behaving unreasonably just because a party to a case is unreasonable.\
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
I’d like to find a citation for even one case where a working custody arrangement was changed at the request of the non-custodial parent simply because s/he didn’t want to pay child support.
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Obviously you won’t find one, but it seems just as obvious that it wasn’t her point that you would.
Then it seems I’m misunderstanding her point. I thought her point was that if you don’t want to pay child support, you should simply get custody. As if that were simple or likely.
And I can’t begin to agree that non physical custodial parents are “not parenting”. Some of them are not parenting, sure. But the court separates legal and physical custody for a reason: some non-custodial parents are quite involved in decisions around education, healthcare, religion, after school activities, homework and the minutiae of child’s life. Their children may not live with them, they may not feed them most of their meals and pay for the roof over their head for most nights, but they’re involved in their lives and in parenting decisions made for them. If that’s not parenting, what is?
Well, the best plan would be to not have kids in the first place if you aren’t really in it until they reach majority. But divorce happens and what it comes down to is either your trust your ex to raise your kids, in which case yo gotta trust them, or if you don’t trust them you have to really look at your options. I have trouble reconciling “I trust you with the life of my child, but, uh, I’d like to monitor your receipts.”
Non-custodial parents may or may not act like parents. But it makes a big difference who has the legal obligation- a non-custodial parents is completely free to say “Eh, I usually pick Kid up from schools on Thursdays, but i have a date so I’m going to skip out.” If the custodial parent decides they don’t feel like being a parent for the evening, they could be looking at jail time. A non-custodial parent is completely free to rearrange their responsibility according to their lifestyle. Bored of parenthood? You can move to a singles colony in Belize! A custodial parent doesn’t have those options. Stepping up to the plate is nice and the right thing to do, but legal responsibility is an entirely different beast.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Then it seems I’m misunderstanding her point. I thought her point was that if you don’t want to pay child support, you should simply get custody. As if that were simple or likely.
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You asked for a citation for a non-custodial parent petitioning the court for and winning custody on the grounds that the parent just didn’t want to pay child support. In real life, the court’s making a decision based on the best interest of the child, so of course each parent’s argument is going to focus on that. I think it’s only fair to assume based on her other posts and the ones she’s responding to that even sven understands that you can’t get custody just by saying “well, I don’t want to pay, so…” But you can get custody, or joint custody – as in that is a phenomenon that exists – and if there are factors that work against you in that effort they are probably (not definitely) factors that ought to work against you, e.g. the fact that you haven’t really raised them up 'til that point or you work all the time or the other parent has a better argument or whatever. But the point is that it’s an option, and that’s something that should be pointed out when people complain about the injustice of being forced to throw away arbitrary amounts of money, as if it’s a punishment being needlessly enforced.
And that’s my point, too. To the extent that any particular non-custodial parent is actually parenting, in an ordinary case, that will be reflected in the support award, because it will be reflected in the custody allocation. A parent who says from the beginning that they want to be very involved in the children’s lives, and who demonstrates that they can be and should be, will be involved, and they’ll pay less in child support. And since that’s true, you can’t argue a parent’s right to raise his/her own children as a problem with the amount of support ordered against a 100% non-custodial parent.
I understand that you object to my characterization of what parenting is, but I think it’s jtgain’s attempt to define parental rights in terms of money spent that’s the source of the offense there. If the objection to child support award amounts is based on “freedom of parenting,” then it’s kind of unavoidable to respond by pointing out that those freedoms usually attend the physical acts of raising the child.
I guess here is the fundamental disconnect. A non-custodial parent is certainly “parenting” by my definition. The child has to live somewhere and short of sawing it in half, it should have a primary home somewhere and that is usually with Mom. That doesn’t make Dad disappear because he lives somewhere else. Your statement is an insult to all fathers who, for whatever reason, had the audacity to get a divorce.
And the second part of your statement is circular. Yes, the state has its own rules and that is what I am arguing against. The state shouldn’t have different rules simply because of a divorce. Why is it absurd for a court to decide that 1% above a hobo level of support is fully sufficient in a marriage, but when parents are divorced, one should go to jail for providing that level of support?
And if the courts cared about the support level of children, why can the custodial parent take that money and gamble it away without the court giving a damn so long as the kids have a hobo level of support? If such a thing is shirking parental responsibility, then why do we only enforce it on the non-custodial parent with the threat of debtor’s prison?
My point is not that it is too complicated, it’s that it is impossible to distinguish between an individual and a household. In your friends’ case, she is an adult, and it’s presumably okay for the kids money to go to anything that supports the household. The problem with non-custodial parents demanding accountability is that they want the money to somehow go exclusively to the kids without the parent getting any benefit. It’s that benefit they resent–the idea that that bitch is living a better life than she would otherwise be living.
So, answer for me: if a parent uses a child support check to put the whole household in a better apartment complex than she could ever afford on her own–even if she were childless–is that using the money on the kids or on herself? They have better schools, a safer environment, and a nice pool, but she’s got a bigger bedroom than she would have had, access to a gym, etc. Is she taking advantage of him? Should she keep the kids in a less ideal place to avoid the incidental improvement in her own life? Should she move into the apartment, but not use the gym? What are the ethics?
I think it depends on where they were living *before *the divorce. Maintaining the same house or apartment, I see no problem with, if it can be managed on fewer dollars than before (since presumably the non-custodial parent is maintaining a separate household now.) Moving to a *nicer *one than before the divorce? I think that’s only ethical if the additional expense is coming out of her pocket, or she remarries and uses her new spouse’s funds, or if the non-custodial parent is amenable to the required increase in support for the benefit of the kids.
And I think that statistics show that the lifestyle of custodial mothers and their children goes *down *far more often than it goes up, so I think you’re arguing a rare exception to the rule here. Rare exceptions, by definition, need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, and that’s why we have courts.