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When it comes to child support, sometimes the court imposes an obligation on someone other than the parent who is paying child support. This often comes into play when child support is paid directly from the employer of the person paying child support to the parent who is receiving support. However, sometimes there are issues with the employer’s withholding of this income. Income withholding violations are serious matters that can result in a child not getting his or her needs met.
Withholding
The state of Illinois puts a high priority on making sure that the children in the state are supported and have their needs met. As part of this, in order to make sure that court ordered child support is paid timely and in full, the default payment arrangement for child support in Illinois is through income withholding.
Income withholding is a process whereby an employer or other income provider automatically withholds money from the payor’s pay or benefit check and pays it to the other parent directly. Parents can agree for child support to be paid from one parent to the other parent without using income withholding, though this can be a mistake if there are ever any issues about whether payments were made. Generally, income withholding is more straightforward and can eliminate some conflict.
Criminal Law
Illinois criminal law defines domestic battery as knowingly causing bodily harm or making insulting or provoking physical contact to a household or family member. For a first offense, domestic battery is generally a class A misdemeanor. However, domestic battery is a class four felony if the person who committed the crime has a record of domestic violence or one of many other violence-related charges. If the battery is in the presence of a child, there can be increased penalties. In addition to the other penalties, an Illinois a domestic violence conviction may make someone ineligible to carry or own firearms.
Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986
The Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986 (IDVA) was passed to officially recognize domestic violence as a problem and to give direction to agencies that are involved with domestic violence.
Those of us with pets often feel like they are part of the family. Therefore, in the event of a divorce, deciding who gets to keep the pet can be a huge conflict. There are several different factors that affect a court’s decision regarding pet custody. Generally, the rule is that a pet is personal property like any other property. However, sometimes the court is willing to see a pet as unique.
Pet Custody Agreement
Couples can create an agreement that lays out what would happen to a pet in the event of a divorce. The court does not necessarily have to uphold the agreement, but it may help the couple come to their own agreement about the pet. Like most other parts of property division during a divorce, a court will almost always approve an arrangement to which the couple agrees.
Marital or Separate Property?
With any property involved in a divorce, the court will first decide whether the property is marital property, and is thus subject to division, or whether it is the separate property of one of the couples. The court is more likely to see a pet as one person’s separate property if he or she owned the pet before the marriage. However, if the pet was bought or rescued by the couple during the marriage, then the court may look to other factors to determine who gets the pet if the couple cannot agree.
At the start of 2016, Illinois implemented several changes to its family law. Specifically, changes were made to Illinois divorce law.
There are no longer any grounds for divorce besides irreconcilable differences. Additionally, the term “custody” was eliminated, as well as the requirement for court approval in order to move with a child, pending the destination is within a certain radius.
Though the changes may be small, they indicate important modifications in procedures and concepts made by the legislature.
No More “Custody” and “Visitation”
Previously, the language in the law used the terms “custody” and “visitation." Now, the law uses the terms “decision making” and “parenting time,” respectively. One of the major reasons why the law moved away from the word “custody” was because it was unclear and left parents confused.
A parent would ask for “custody,” meaning that he or she wanted the child to live with him or her. However, the court also defined custody as the power and ability to make decisions on behalf of the child, such as school choice or medical decisions. Now, the court has changed the terminology to make it more straightforward by calling it “decision making.”
The Illinois Custody Relinquishment Prevention Act went into effect in 2015 to help curb a problem that many families were facing. The issue was called “custody for care”—families who needed intensive mental health support for their children would feel forced into giving up custody to the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS).
The Problem the Act Addresses
Children with severe mental health issues often need intensive and expensive psychiatric treatment. Yet even with health insurance, many plans do not cover this kind of treatment. Therefore, parents were not able to access this treatment on their own.
If parents gave custody to DCFS then they were able to provide those services. Parents were left with a difficult choice—either their child would go without treatment, or parents would need to give up parental rights to their child.
Going through a divorce can be incredibly difficult for all parties involved. However, a divorce takes a special toll on the children of a failing marriage. Custody battles can get nasty, but in the end the judge is supposed to make decisions that are the best interest of the children. More and more frequently, judges are finding that shared parenting time is what is best for the children involved.
Previous Trend
In the past, split custody between parents was common. Children would live with one parent while the noncustodial parent would have “visitation” and spend a much smaller amount of time with the children. Experts and judges believed that it was better for the children to have a stable home and see the noncustodial parent occasionally. Yet this would often turn into a situation that was colloquially called “Disney Dad”—when the noncustodial parent had a relationship with his children that centered on fun activities instead of a typical parent/child relationship that included both fun times and serious times, stressful times, and other aspects of everyday life. Now, courts and experts are moving in a different direction.
If you are considering divorce, you may have concerns regarding whether or not you will have to pay alimony, also known as spousal support or maintenance. Spousal support is less common than it once was, but it is still ordered in some divorces.
Factors the Court Takes into Consideration
The court considers several factors when determining a spousal maintenance award. Maintenance calculations are separate from child support (for the most part) and are not influenced by any marital wrongdoing or fault. The factors the court will look at include the income and property of each spouse, the financial needs of the spouses, the length of the marriage, and the future and present earning capacity and job prospects of the spouses. Additionally, the court will look at whether the spouse requesting alimony contributed to the education or training of the other spouse, the health of the spouses, and any other considerations the court finds relevant.
Time magazine recently reported on the history of divorce in the United States. While it may be assumed that divorce is a modern concept that did not become popular until the 1960s and 1970s, the first uptick in the American divorce was approximately 200 years beforehand.
Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, identifies the American revolution as the beginning of the increase in the divorce rate in America. The concept of the revolution and breaking the union of countries was a precursor of the increase of divorce in the 1820s and 1830s as people began to realize that independence from spouses could be analogous to the separation between England and America.
However, the laws were very different then. Moreover, couples had to prove to the court that there was adultery or physical cruelty in order to get divorced. To get around these restrictions, many people relied on the “omnibus clauses” in divorce law which allowed judges to grant divorces in other cases at their discretion.
In Illinois, there is a statute that regulates a sperm donor’s liability for child support. Illinois law removes child support liability from any sperm donor as long as the insemination takes place with the assistance of a licensed physician. This is the only time donor agreements are specifically upheld in Illinois.
This September, a Cook County case dismissed a woman’s claim for child support from a sperm donor with whom the woman claimed she also had a romantic relationship. The Chicago Law Bulletin reports that this case is the first published case law that concerns donor agreements.
With the exception of truly unique circumstances, biological parents are generally not able to contract away their responsibilities for child support without court approval. The main circumstance where the court may agree to terminate the responsibility for child support is if one or both of the biological parents voluntarily give up their rights. In addition, there must be at least one person who is willing and able to adopt the child and take on those responsibilities.
If you have followed any recent celebrity news, or even mainstream news, you have probably heard about the impending divorce of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie—two of the most famous people in the United States.
The actors have six children together. Therefore, along with figuring out the monetary parts of their divorce, they will also have to determine parenting time and responsibility arrangements regarding the children.
The divorce was filed in California and thus California law would apply. If they were getting divorced in Illinois, however, things would look a little different.
Jolie’s Proposal
According to news sources, Jolie has requested sole physical custody of the children and has asked for joint legal custody. What this means is that if granted, the children would live with Jolie. Though, presumably, Pitt would have some visitation with the children with or without other conditions (such as supervision).
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