Kansas City Family Law Blog

Keeping family conflict at bay during the holidays is a real concern for divorced couples. However, doing so is important for a few reasons, including proper stress management and maintaining optimum mental health for you and your children. In this case, VeryWellFamily.com recommends the following advice to ensure your holiday season is free of needless battles.

Prepare yourself for conflict

While it may be reasonable to expect that tensions exist between you and your ex-spouse immediately following your divorce in Jackson County, the passage of time should help ease those, especially if your ex-spouse remains compliant to any support obligations they may have (such as child support). It is well known that (in most cases) parents paying child support are no longer required to do so once a child reaches the age of majority. Yet what if you have a disabled child? Many in your situation come to us here at the Stange Law Firm concerned that once their ex-spouses' child support obligations end, they will struggle to meet their disabled children's needs on their own. 

The hope is that your ex-spouse will understand the need to continue to offer financial support for your disabled child into adulthood. Yet if they express an unwillingness to, you should know that the law does provide a method to extend a child support obligation past the age of 18 for disabled persons. Per Section 452.340 of Missouri's Revised Statutes, your ex-spouse may be ordered to continue to pay child support for your disabled child if the following elements exist in your case: 

• Your child's physical or mental handicap makes them unable to support themselves
• Your child has no realistic prospect of ever being financially solvent
• Your child remains unmarried

Family law experts in Jackson County will often recommend that you and your spouse enter into a prenuptial agreement prior to your marriage in order to protect each of your existing financial interests should your marriage end. Yet even the experts may agree that not every marriage may need a prenup. Neither of you may have brought significant assets into your marriage, or even if you did, you may have decided that you ultimately did not care how they might be divided should you separate (which likely seemed to be an impossibility at the time). 

Now, for whatever reason, you may be questioning that decision. If so, you should know that postnuptial agreement can be just as good at protecting your assets from being divided or lost in a divorce settlement. A cynic might say that your wanting a postnuptial agreement is a sure sign of you believing that your marriage is already on its way to failing. Yet there are indeed circumstances where considering postnuptial agreement might be the best option for you and your spouse. 

Oftentimes, married parents in Jackson County might have difficulties supporting themselves and their children. One can only imagine how much more difficult such as task becomes if and when such a couple chooses to divorce. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that as recently as 2015, over $33.7 billion was owed in child support. With such a large sum of money at stake (along with the well-being of those that are owed it), it should come as little surprise that family courts take the issue of child support enforcement so seriously. 

One effective method in resolving child support arrears has been to restrict the privileges of those that owe them. Many states will even suspend the driver's licenses of obligor parents in such situations; Missouri is among them. Per Section 454.1003 of the state's Revised Statutes, one subject to a child support obligation can have his or her driver's license suspended in any of the following situations: 

• He or she owes an amount in child support arrears equaling either the sum of three months worth of payments or $2500
• He or she fails to comply with a subpoena from the court concerning the modification of an existing child support order
• He or she fails to comply with a subpoena from the court concerning the establishment of paternity
• He or she fails to comply with a subpoena from the court over matters related to genetic testing