subject: Chandler Divorce Lawyer - Can A Parent Refuse To Allow Visitation If Child Support Is Not Paid? [print this page] You know, I understand that question because so many people say, You know, its so unfair. He or she isnt paying child support, yet they still visit. Here I am bearing the burden of making all the payments to insure that my child has a roof over his head, and the other parent isnt paying but they expect visitation.
The answer is no, you cant do that.
You have to allow the other parent visitation privileges regardless of whether theyre paying child support or not. And if you fail to allow them visitation, that can effect your own visitation. The court will not accept the response that youve failed to allow the parent visitation because theyre not paying child support. Theyre two completely separate issues. The court does not tie child support payments to visitation privileges.
Its really important to understand that that they are completely legally independent of one another. Because what you can do is you can bring suit to compel the other party to pay their child support. One of the questions the court is going to ask of you is have you been allowing visitation. If you have, really youre coming to the court with clean hands, so to speak. Thats the information you want to be able to give.
Dont ever stop visitation because youre not receiving child support. Instead, simply turn around, tell the other party that youre going to enforce the order thats causing them to pay the child support, and then proceed to go to court to get those monies back along with arrearages.
Thats a much better solution than stopping visitation because of that.
What impact could a parents dating have on child custody?
Thats such a good question. A lot of divorcesI shouldnt say maybe a lot, but some divorces are caused because one parent has found a significant other in their life and has decided to divorce.
Now, the impact that this can have is Arizona follows a guideline by which it says there shouldnt really be any dating within three months of the divorce. Now, of course, if you have a relationship at the time of the divorce, that can really impact your custody agreement. It can impact it in a couple of ways.
One, the court kind of frowns upon it in the sense that they really believe that there should be kind of a cooling off period there where neither party is involved with anyone else and their attention is really focused on their children to get the children through that impact of divorce. They sort of have, like I said, kind of like a meter of about 90 days.
Now thats not really an enforceable rule. Its more of a guideline. Thats something that the court looks at.
Where the impact comes the most is where your spouse or your soon-to-be ex-spouse finds out about this relationship. You always have to agree with the other parent when youre putting together a custody and visitation agreement.
If you cant get their agreement--and in a large part you might not be able get it because theyre very upset about this new relationship and they dont think its appropriate that your children be visiting with this new party, seeing them possibly as a new parent almost--thats where youve really fall into the greatest problems.
My suggestion to people who are dating while they are going through a divorce is to really not have that around your children, first and foremost. And if you can wait the 90 days, its so much better for you. Youre more likely to get an agreement with your soon-to-be ex-spouse. The two of you can model your parenting plan and your visitation around the things that you think are most important.
And there isnt this big red herring of theres another party involved in here and bringing it up to the court putting it in the courts hands to make a decision knowing that the court may fall back on the plan of not having any dating for 90 days. Youre better off simply not doing it and trying to reach in settlement about visitation and custody with your spouse first before you start dating.
by: Christy Thompson
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