Hi, Tim Blankenship here at divorce661.com and this episode is going to be more of a rant and personal opinion of mine, so it’ll be a little bit different from the informational videos that we put out.
This is based on a call I received from a gentleman who had been served with a request for order and his wife was asking to modify custody and child support, and that happens all the time. What had happened is, he had been remarried, had new family, new wife of course, new kids, and the previous children no longer wanted to live with him for a variety of reasons. Apparently, that was mutual.
The father did not want them living with him, either. The children from the divorce started living with Mom on a full time basis and that went on for a period of 6 months. When he called, he didn’t really want to fight the fact that she wanted the children. In fact, he said you know, I really just want to give up my parenting rights altogether.
I don’t even want to see my children, she can have them for all I care. I just don’t want to pay any more in child support. And I said, well you’re going to pay more child support. That’s what she’s asking for and if she has more time and everything remains the same, the child support is going to up.
So we started talking about child support, but he was really emphasizing on the fact that he wanted to give up his parenting, he did not want to be the parent, he wanted to give up his legal rights to them, how disruptive they were, he didn’t want them around his new children.
I mean, he really didn’t want his children around at all. When we looked at what the child support might be based on the new time share, the child support more than doubled. At that point, he totally changed his tune and said, well what can you do to help me get my children, because I am not going to pay that support.
So, this is more of a video about integrity, about custody, about children. This guy really rubbed me the wrong way because he asked me how am I going to fight for him to get his children back. This is obviously not in the best interests of the children. He wanted the children solely so he didn’t have to pay additional child support.
For the 1st 20 minutes of the call he told me how awful the kids were and he never wanted to see them again and was totally fine with it. But on the alternative, when he found out he was going to have to pay more child support, all of a sudden he wanted to fight for 50 50 custody.
Tell me how that’s in the best interests of the children, and is he actually going to bring them into his family? Probably not. So, 2 things. Number 1 is, I want to tell you how an attorney would twist this. Well, let me back up. I told him, look, you’ve already established a pattern over the last 6 months with your 2 children already living with her, so if she had hired me I would have told her she had a better than 95 per cent chance of winning, there’s no winning or losing in this, of course, but winning as far as getting her children because she’s already established a pattern over the past 6 months of the children living with her full time.
That’s going to be hard to beat. Now, talking about what an attorney would do. They would obfuscate and make everything confusing and probably write a declaration in his response to say, oh she took the children away and it’s not fair to him and how bad he wants the children, he misses the kids. This is what attorneys do.
They just confuse the situation and then the judge has to make a decision. All the while knowing that he doesn’t want the kids, he’s going to go find an attorney to write a declaration in response to her request for having the children full time and say how much he wants them and loves them and all this, simply because he doesn’t want to have to pay additional child support.
So that’s not a client that I would ever work with. It’s not someone I even want to personally know. Just have some integrity. Do what’s in the best interests of your children and everything will work out.
Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.
