First, the idea is to maintain the child's standard of living he/she experienced in a two-parent household before the divorce, not either parent's.

Second, how is child support paid to the custodial parent equal to 50% of the child support costs when virtually everything the custodial parent earns goes towards the support of the child?

Third, weekends, holidays, birthdays and weeks in the summer do not equate to 24/7 every other day of the year. Who takes the child shopping for clothes, school supplies and anything else they need? Who does the child's laundry? Who wakes the child up and transports him/her to school and ensures they are supervised after school and then picks them up again? Who provides the meals to the child? Who spends the time with the child and supervises homework and transports to and from school functions and outings? Who is up at night and home during the day taking days off of work when the child is sick? Who pays for daycare during the school year and during the summer? Who takes the child to the doctor and dentist appts and makes the trips to the pharmacy for the medicine and gives the child the medicine 24/7? Who pays the school fees, sports fees, and supervises the child doing school projects? Who deals with the emotional turmoil the child goes through with friends and school?

When all of that is shared equally (and granted it very well may be in some divorce cases), then child support should be equal as well. However, child support paid to the custodial parent is only a portion of the costs in raising a child. Chances are, the majority of the income of the custodial parent is spent on raising the child. Who would the custodial parent pay the child support to? They are already paying for everything. Child support goes for everything involved in raising the child.

I guess if you didn't care what environment your child is raised in when not with you, and didn't put their welfare above your own, you could look at it like it is a burden and unfair.

Now, there are cases where the custodial parent has remarried or earns sufficient income to easily pay for all of those costs in order to maintain the child's standard of living. However, that doesn't release the other parent of the responsibility of sharing in those costs. Child support should never put one parent into true poverty though unless there is no way the child can be taken care of without such support. Typically courts will look at that and adjust child support payments when true hardship is caused because of it. It would have to be a true hardship and true poverty though. Afterall, the custodial parent would want the child's experience and living environment when with the non-custodial parent to be every bit what the child experiences with the custodial parent.

In most cases, it is not a question of entering into true poverty, but rather of entering into a level of not quite so comfortable a living as enjoyed before.




>18 months ago, I spent many hours at the state legislature lobbying against child support increases that put the non-custodial parent further into poverty. I can back up with actual figures that show, at least in Utah, that the non-custodial parent ends up in poverty in order to pay court mandated child support. Many people think the child only spends every other weekend with dad, but when you look at holidays, birthdays, weeks in the summer, it turns out to be about 50%, yet dad ends up paying about 70-80% of child support costs.
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>The child support change bill, that at the start of the legislature was considered to easily pass, in the end passed by one vote, due to our lobbying efforts.
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>BTW, the laws are lop sided in most states because the research the states use is flawed. Typically, they say, "let's see what it costs to run one household" and base everything on that. But in a divorce, you need to run two households.
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>FYI, in my case, divorce was a good thing.
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>>Well Craig, that's downright decent of you.. Somehow, I read into this, you have been the recipient of child support requests. Maybe that explains your position. I know my brothers both say divorce costs so much because it is worth it!<g>