The Child Support Solution: Unhooking Custody from Support

Stephen Erickson, Marilyn McKnight, Donald Saposnek

CSS Press, Oct 17, 2019

After countless decades of observing the emotional and financial devastation resulting from on-going court battles over money and children, we confront a daunting truth- it is still the law in every single state in America that, following parental separation, the amount of time you spend with your children directly determines how much child support you will pay or receive. Moreover, the way for you to end up with more money is to get custody or more time with your children, or to restrict the other parent's time with the children. However, in spite of our current adversarial court system, where one side wins and one side loses, we no longer need to assume that separated parents will be in conflict over child support, or that they need to start court action against each other to determine the child support amount. We now have a SOLUTION to the need to engage in unnecessary battles over custody simply to obtain more child support dollars for their client. Parents now can UNHOOK CUSTODY FROM SUPPORT. It is time to recognize both parents as worthy and important to their children, regardless of their ability (or inability) to earn an income, and regardless of whether they spend more, or less, time with their children. It is time to recognize that divorcing parents need to be encouraged to concentrate on taking care of their children's needs, rather than on fighting costly and time-consuming battles in court. For the sake of the countless children raised each year by separated or divorced parents, this book calls for a dramatic change in the way parents go about sharing the costs of raising them. We are now able to offer to courts, family law attorneys, divorce mediators and, most importantly, families, better tools to avoid these destructive contests.

About the author

Stephen K. Erickson, J.D. is a licensed attorney who works exclusively as a mediator and has been mediating divorces in his private practice since 1977. He is co-founder and co-director of the Erickson Mediation Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has trained thousands of new mediators in the U.S., Canada, Holland, England, and Singapore. He is a founder and second president of the Academy of Family Mediators and has received many awards for his pioneering work in mediation. He has published numerous articles in the professional literature and has co-authored a number of books on mediation, including The Practitioner's Guide to Mediation (Wiley, 2008) and Family Mediation Casebook (Routledge, 2014), among others.

Marilyn McKnight, M.A. is a mediator, trainer, co-founder and co-director of the Erickson Mediation Institute in Minneapolis, who, after an extensive career in public social work, has practiced exclusively in the field of mediation since 1977, and has trained mediators, nationally and internationally. She has been President of several of the national mediation organizations, has pioneered and developed the movement toward the certification of mediators, and has received numerous awards for her prominent work in the mediation field, including the Distinguished Mediator Award by the Academy of Family Mediators. She has co-authored a number of books on mediation, including Mediating Divorce: A Client's Workbook (Jossey-Bass, 1998), and Mediating Divorce: A Step-by-Step Manual (Jossey-Bass, 2002), among others.

Donald T. Saposnek, Ph.D., is a clinical-child psychologist, a child custody mediator, and a national and international trainer and consultant in child psychology and mediation since 1977. He has taught on the Psychology Faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for 41 years, and is an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators' publications, and has published extensively in the professional literature on children, divorce and mediation. He is author or co-author of several books, including Mediating Child Custody Disputes (1983/1998, Jossey-Bass/Wiley), and Splitting America: How Politicians, Super Pacs and the News Media Mirror High Conflict Divorce (2012, HCI Press).

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Child Support Solution: Unhooking Custody from Support
• Authors: Stephen Erickson, Marilyn McKnight, Donald Saposnek
• Publisher: CSS Press, 2019
• ISBN: 0578597446, 9780578597447