The ideal that normal families have a father and mother living with their 2.3 children and dog Spot is long gone now that so many families have step-parents, legal guardians, half-siblings and numerous other ways of becoming blended. As the number of non-traditional families has skyrocketed, so have the complexities of doling out child support. One particular case the Supreme Judicial Court will hear today dramatically illustrates the situations judges must consider and why parents must be held financially responsible for all of their children.
Today’s case involves a wealthy doctor who lives with his wife also a doctor and two other children but had a child out of wedlock with a woman on welfare. The state guidelines indicated that he should pay $20,250 in child support, but his lawyer convinced the judge that his client could not afford that and managed to reduce the annual payment to $14,000. The central legal issue involves the judge’s decision that the father’s financial responsibility ‘rests primarily’ with the family he lives with rather than his ‘second family.’
This case will help set a precedent for determining child support in similar situations, and the SJC should not uphold the ideas that determined the previous ruling. Ideally, the mother and father would equally support the child in terms of both finances and time. However, this simply cannot happen when the parents live separately.
The state’s formula for calculating child support payments primarily uses income, and arguing that a father primarily has an obligation to certain children should not be a justifiable reason for circumventing the formula. The formula is there for a reason and ensures similar cases are decided on similar terms. The formula should remain the standard, and judges should only deviate from it in extremely extenuating circumstances. For example, the formula does not necessarily account for whether a parent is swamped with bills because a child in his ‘primary’ family has leukemia or already has two kids attending Ivy League schools.
Loopholes exist to ensure parents in situations like these do not have to pay so much in child support that their other children suffer. These cases are about children, and their welfare cannot be ignored because of all their parents’ bickering. Children must rely on their parents to be financially responsible, and parents must be equally financially responsible for all their children. When the state’s highest court rules on today’s case, it must keep these ideas in mind and not allow ‘second families’ to come in second in financial obligations.
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