If you have been raising a child on your own in California without the financial support of the other parent, then you may be entitled to obtain a child support award from that parent, which will be set based on a variety of factors, including each parent’s incomes and the time spent with the child. Presumably, if you are seeking child support, you have been spending significant time raising the child on your own – possibly since birth – and so the question arises whether you can obtain retroactive child support payments from the other parent. This will largely depend on whether you have already obtained an initial order for child support and are seeking to enforce the order or whether you are seeking child support for the time.
When You Are Seeking Child Support for the First Time
A parent seeking child support cannot usually seek child support for the period before the petition for child support was filed with a California family court. Thus, if you wait until a child is 14 to seek child support, you will usually not be able to get support for the prior years of raising the child on your own. What this means is that a parent should work with an attorney to file for child support as soon as possible after a divorce or after the child is born where the parents were never married. A court can, however, award child support payments retroactive to the date of the filing of the request, so the sooner you file, the better.
If there is evidence, however, that the other parent concealed assets from you or took other steps to prevent you from obtaining child support, however, your attorney may be able to argue for increased payments as a result.
When You Are Seeking to Enforce an Existing Order
That said, if you have an existing child support order and the other parent has not been making his or her payments pursuant to the order, your attorney can go to court to successfully argue for payment of all backpayments that were missed by the other parent. Family courts can use numerous powerful legal tools to facilitate the payment of backpayments, including garnishing wages, suspending a parent’s professional license, placing liens on property, suing the parent’s employer, and intercepting tax refunds and government benefits.
When You Are Seeking to Modify a Child Support Order
Oftentimes, a single parent needs a modification upwards in a child support order to account for increased needs, make up for a loss in income, or to simply obtain a fair payment based on the other parent’s increased or recently discovered income. Like an original order, this can be made retroactive but only to the date of the filing of the petition for the modification, so a parent is encouraged to act quickly in contacting an experienced California family law attorney to maximize the child support to be ordered.
For any questions on family law in California, contact the Law Office of Kelley C. Finan today to schedule a consultation to discuss your circumstances.