Parenting time

Do, do not vent on social media, even to your family, 'cause if you've done it in writing, somebody's recorded it, and somebody's gonna get mad at you and share with your ex what you said about her or him online, and that's where you run into trouble.

How, how can, um, situations where parents' social media activity affect custody or parenting time decisions? How does that happen?

Oof.

I, I mean, I think I mentioned before, telling...

You mentioned demanding work schedules.

How do demanding work schedules, travel, or other obligations affect the way parenting time is arranged?

Well, I mean, I think sometimes the parents have to be flexible, um, a- as best they can.

You know, you have, um, firefighters who are on 24, off 48.

There was no child support.

And so I came into child support work that everything was brand new right so in the article you kind of touched on something that i had kind of kind of thought about and then forgotten kind of thought about and then forgotten and then i was reminded again about actually having parenting time uh as one of the potential things that can be pulled away if you don't provide that support um How, I mean, so I'm just curious from your perspective, like how can agencies acknowledge those concerns without suggesting that support actually depends on access to the child?

So parenting time is, is huge.

Right.

And it's one of the things that I'm really going on too, because if you follow the narrative, you have guys who are just not interested in being around their children.

And so, um, While acknowledging that that formula may be right or wrong, again, culturally and or intentionally, we have to understand that there are reasons why someone may not be spending as much time as they like.

And the other thing I got to tell you, we don't do a good job or we do a poor job is pitting parents against each other.

Because of the system, we're making mom and dad at each other and the parenting time is affected because the parents aren't co-parenting for the betterment of the child they're going in this child support war.

It has to be how the state where you live, how they, what are their laws? What are their statutes? And that is what it gets applied to your divorce.

So if you live in a state where they believe in equal parenting time, then regardless of the fact that you were the parent who did all the appointments and attended all the open houses and scheduled the play dates and did all the doctor visits, whatever, it's now time for the other parent to step up.

And you can't get in the way and say, well, they never did it before, so they can't do it now.

They are afforded an opportunity based on the laws of the state to try.

That was the mom's responsibility.

Sometimes they're like unsaid responsibilities.

So as the parent who's doing all the primary caretaking, you think that you have a higher percentage to parenting time because you did all the things.

Well, that could have just been the roles that you had in your marriage.

Let's talk about what it is that usually leads someone to even ask the court to modify child support in Massachusetts.

So typically... for the payee or the recipient, it's simply that they, they've either know that the payor has gotten a major increase in salary or the payor is not exercising the same amount of parenting time as was ordered.

And for the payor, it's typically they've lost a job or, you know, they are exercising substantially more time.

than they had previously been ordered.

That said, it's really a discussion of, you know, what... what amount is worth it to you? And that's hard because sometimes you have, you know, you still have people who are still very acrimonious and they're like, nope, I want more money.

And we have to sit down and do the benefits versus the cost and the time.

And the reality is, unless you're looking at a substantial increase, because you also need to look at the parenting orders and the parenting time involved, because there's really only two different ways the child support come out in Massachusetts.

We calculate it on a 50-50 split or what we call a 70-30 or in every other weekend.

And then It does its algorithmic thing and poof, we have a child support number.

So how does parenting time affect the amount of child support that may be ordered?

Parenting time in terms of overnights is what changes a child support order.

If you have a child's visitation schedule where you've got some dinner visits, something like that, that doesn't alter the child support amount.

The algorithm considers overnights because that's generally where you've got dinner and breakfast and showers and electricity and all those costs for the kid.

You're not sandbagging your job search, for example.

Sure.

Sometimes there's a change in the parenting time schedule.