McCormack Family Law | Top Divorce Lawyer | Child Custody & Support

Psychologist Ruth Bettelheim brought some well-deserved attention to child custody and child support reform in a recent op ed in the New York Times. She advocates for two changes in New York. First, no-fault custody proceedings that include fixed formulas for child support to avoid conflict on financial issues of parenting. Second, mediation procedures to lessen conflict over custody issues.

Unlike New York, Ohio is ahead of the curve on no-fault custody, which is now standard practice. It means that lifestyle attacks on one parent or the other are not favored; they have little impact on the allocation of parental rights, absent very specific evidence of a harmful effect on the children. In other words, shared parenting is now Ohio’s default arrangement.

When it comes to child support, on the other hand, we’re not quite on the cutting edge. Ohio does have a fixed formula for child support contributions, to ensure that, as Bettelheim says, ‘children are well taken care of in both homes, regardless of the number of days they spend in each.’

In theory, that precludes contests between parents trying to trade off days and hours of possession against dollars. The wrench in the works is that Ohio still permits deviation from the guideline amounts for a number of statutorily enumerated reasons—one of them being the amount of time the children spend in each household! So fights about time and money re-enter through the back door.

Fortunately, most courts decline to grant deviations from the formula, especially when the wealthier parent argues that equal time of possession should permit them to reduce their child support obligation.

These parents misunderstand the principle behind the formula: child support is meant to approximate the standard of living the children would have enjoyed had no divorce taken place.  Even when time of possession is evenly split, the children deserve to have an appropriate standard of living in both households. So the formula usually survives the challenge in court.

Still, the child support deviation for amount of time spent in each household needs to be removed from the statute in those cases where there is a significant income difference between parents. In these cases, delinking time spent in each household from child support paid will eliminate the need to adjudicate these manufactured conflicts. And that, as Bettelheim observes, would promote ‘the one thing that children of divorce need most: peace between their parents.’ Amen.

As to mediation for custody and other parenting issues, Ohio courts are again way ahead of New York. They routinely recognize mediation as a useful tool in finding ways for parents to communicate and to lessen conflict and its impact on children. Most courts require mediation of parenting issues and keep an experienced mediator on staff to provide litigants with a low cost alternative.

So, if you’re dealing with the allocation of parental rights, look for the processes that best serve the kids. Look into mediation and its benefits. Fight downward deviations in child support when one parent earns substantially more than the other parent. And keep the dispute on the high road, dealing only with those issues that directly impact the children.

By the way, Bettelheim also has some good news about kids of divorced parents. More about that in the next post.

Tags: child custody, child support, mediation

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