It’s always hard to navigate the transition from married couple to separate households, especially when you and your soon-to-be ex share children in common. For stay at home moms, the transition is often even more pronounced because most of their lives, up until this point, has been spent caring for the kids.
After separation and/or divorce, the balance is tipped. Many soon-to-be ex husbands will not quite as readily agree to financially support SAHM life for their ex-wives. The law, if I’m being honest, doesn’t entirely support it either. Guidelines for child and spousal support are not overly generous (even if child support guidelines will increase in Virginia beginning July 1, 2025), so many moms find that being stay at home is not financially feasible.
Dads – especially if their former partners have been stay at home moms – were already working, which may mean that the disruption to their lives feels less severe. They, for the most part, go on working and earning as they always have. Even though they may resent paying support, whether it feels like a lot or a little, they aren’t expected to make major changes in the same way.
Most dads will quickly discover that the amount of parenting time they exercise has a direct tie to how much child support they’ll pay. Even dads who were formerly uninterested in the day to day management of the children will realize, often pretty quickly, that if they ask for 50% of the time, not only are they likely to get it (yes, even if they haven’t taken an active role in parenting up until this point), but they’ll also pay WAY LESS in child support.
They’re often quick to pick up on this. Moms, on the other hand, are still working on how to make the day-to-day work. Do they get a job? What job? What schedule? How much will they earn? How will they accommodate dad’s already-existing schedule? Can they work from home? What about benefits? It can quickly become a confusing jungle of considerations.
Meanwhile, dad is saying that he wants 50%, and he wants this specific 50% – because it supports his already-established working schedule – leaving mom desperately trying to fill in the gaps to be able to keep her 50%, even at the same time that she finds all of this ridiculous because dad was perfectly content to let her do 100% just a week or two ago. Does he even want the kids – or does he just want the reduction in child support? It’s hard not to feel a little scathing about the sudden turnaround in his feelings about parenting time.
But him choosing his 50% based off of his own already established work schedule is another limitation on mom’s ability to find work that fills the random gaps in whatever his already existing schedule was. It makes it exponentially more difficult. And now, instead of worrying about dad getting 50% at all, she’s worried about LOSING her 50%, because she can’t find a job that perfectly aligns with his schedule so that she can exercise the parenting time where he’s already working.
If it feels unfair, that’s because it is! But that doesn’t mean that – just because this is what dad wants – it’ll go down that way. This is a scenario where I find that it’s easy for moms, especially moms who are unrepresented, to find themselves being easily taken advantage of in court.
Talk to a family law attorney in your area to figure out how best to proceed but, in general, it’s always a good idea to know what you’re asking for. That’s the main benefit dad has to his side: he already knows exactly what he’s asking for. And it’s pretty reasonable, generally speaking, to expect to have parenting time during that time when you’re not working.
But that doesn’t mean that the converse is same – that you should have to only have parenting time when it suits his schedule. In this instance, doing the research to find out what type of jobs and schedules are available to you will be really helpful. Not having a job, or even having any idea of the kind of work that you want to do, makes these negotiations more difficult because no conflict actually exists.
But you also don’t want to spend the rest of your children’s childhood being outmaneuvered by your ex or structuring your life around his. For many parents, the reality is that a Monday to Friday 9-5 job is the norm. That doesn’t mean that one parent or the other receives preference during the “off” times; it means that both parents have to share the off e and both parents share responsibility, too, for finding childcare (or school or whatever) to care for the children while they’re working.
Being proactive – rather than reactive – is definitely ideal. It can be hard to navigate such major changes on a tight timeline, but it’s still better to do what you can to gather information and present a coherent argument for what you can or cannot do rather than fly by the seat of your pants and hope for the best.
For more information, or to request a copy of our custody book for Virginia moms, give our office a call at 757-425-5200 or visit our website at hoflaw.com.