What Happens to Child Support Obligations When Stepparents Enter the Picture?

To an optimist, remarriage means a feeling of resolution, a new normal.  Now, instead of being a broken family, your children are part of a blended family.  You imagine the future, when your child introduces both sets of his or her parents at his or her wedding.  The axiom that every family is unique applies to remarriage as much as it does to divorce.  For some people, the pain of divorce does not hit home until one spouse remarries.  It might have felt natural for you and your ex to divorce; it was less stressful for your children when you and your ex each had a separate house, so you couldn’t constantly get on each other’s nerves, and the court cast the deciding vote about parenting time and finances.  You might see your children at their most resentful, and your ex at his most cantankerous, only when you remarry.  Everything changes when a stepparent enters the picture, but child support is not supposed to.  A Boca Raton child support lawyer can help you if your ex is trying to nickel and dime you about your children’s finances now that you have remarried.

The Court Assumes That Stepparents Don’t Financially Support Their Stepchildren

Finances for blended families are complicated, but being confronted with this complexity can help you gain clarity.  Blended families account for a large share of prenuptial agreements, but even couples that don’t sign a prenup tend to have prenup-like discussions about family finances if one or both spouses has children from a previous marriage.  At some point during your engagement to your new spouse, you probably said something like, “The court says that I contribute X amount of money to my children’s expenses, and my ex pays X amount in child support.”

Parenting plans are customized to reflect the family’s unique situation, but child support guidelines are a mathematical formula.  They only account for the contributions of the child’s two legal parents.  When the children have stepparents, the guidelines do not count the stepparents’ income as a factor; an exception is when a stepparent includes the children on his or her employer-provided health insurance plan.  It is not always as easy to itemize a family’s finances as the child support guidelines make it seem.  Your new spouse may pay the mortgage on the house where your children spend some nights, and this fact does not entitle your ex to a discount on child support.  If your ex is up in arms about the fact that his child support amount didn’t decrease when you remarried, you are within your rights to say, “Tough luck.”  The times when you can modify a child support order are when you modify the parenting plan and when the paying parent suffers an involuntary reduction in income.

Contact Schwartz | White About Co-Parenting for the Long Haul

A South Florida family law attorney can help you if your remarriage has caused disagreements about child support payments.  Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.

Source:

scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1784653201253199548&q=divorce+farm&hl=en&as_sdt=4,10&as_ylo=2014&as_yhi=2024