In modern world children’s rights is a highly respectable category which is protected by international law. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child the primary responsibility to provide comprehensive support to children lies with their parents. In this sphere one of the legal mechanisms to protect children’s rights is child support.
What child support is?
Child support or child maintenance is a periodical payment made by one parent to another for the financial support of children when the parents are not together. Child support refers just to the payment in the benefit of a child and has nothing to do with other forms of parental support, such as emotional and physical care and so on.
This child support can be set up in the case of divorce, or even if marriage never existed but paternity or maternity is established. No gender requirements to child support exist, it can be paid from a father to a mother as well as vice versa. In special cases child support can be paid not to a custodial parent but to a caregiver or the government.
Obtaining child support
Practically there are two ways of arranging child maintenance. The first one is a voluntary agreement of parents, when all the conditions on the amount of money and time of payments are discussed and accepted by parents themselves without involving the court. The second way is to apply to the court that will consider the case. Sometimes even the lawyers can be hired by one or both sides to oversee their child support cases for them.
Child support agency
As most of the parents are not familiar with the subject before they face the situation, there exist special child support agencies that provide different kinds of help for them. For example, the services of a general child support agency include information support, establishing paternity, locating parents and collecting child support payments. Some child support agencies offer on their web-sites child support calculator. This service allows you to calculate approximately how much will be the child support payment in your case.
Calculating child support payments
The main question to decide while arranging child maintenance is how much money should be paid. The amount of money to be paid depends on the laws of every country. Most often, while calculating child support payments, several things are taken into account, for example, the income of the parents, the number of children and their age, special needs or disability of children, basic living expenses.
Child support enforcement
As child support is protected by law, there are some mechanisms to collect this payment when it is set up by court but isn’t paid. The measures of child support enforcement vary from one country to another. Regarding the United States, the penalty used is, e.g., a suspension of driver, professional or hunting licenses. In the case of great non-payment even passport may be denied and at worst the result can be a jail term.
Of course the best way to arrange child maintenance is to achieve the agreement between parents; in this case no additional payments will be taken by agencies, lawyers and courts to reimburse their expenses and the case can be decided in the acceptable way for both sides. But if the agreement is impossible by some reasons, the only thing to do is to apply for help officially.