My name is Stephanie and I am seeking assistance with a custody case.

I have a court date set, 2/3/09 for a modification to a shared parenting order and the modification I seek is full allocation of parental rights and responsibilities.

As background, the shared parenting order was put into place approximately 6 years ago. My daughter lived with her father for two years, and then lived with my parents during which time a grandparents power of attorney was put into place. That has since expired.

For the past three years my daughter has lived with me.


I am seeking, as I said, full custody and support, and I would like to seek arrearages from the time that I filed the modification, back in October, along with at least 50% of the medical costs of which her father has paid nothing, even since the time she lived with him, for as far back as I can go by law. He also has not paid anything to insure her, although we are both supposed to have insurance. My daughter has bipolar disorder along with athsma for which the medication, physician, psychiatry and counseling costs are very high. My daughter will be 17 1/2 at the time of our court date. She will be
Attending high school through 2010 and will be attending college thereafter.


I need help with additional filings and perhaps a consult with your attorney to find out how far back I can go and what I can seek relief for through FCCSEA.

Any help or ideas you can give would be appreciated. Thank you for your time. Please let me know what your retainers and etc would be.
Sincerely,

I need help with additional filings and perhaps a consult with your attorney to find out how far back I can go and what I can seek relief for through FCCSEA.

You cannot hire a lawyer on this site, you will have to search for a lawyer in your area.

Good luck.

In California, just to give you an example of how it typically works, you cannot get support any earlier than the date you served (not filed) your motion to modify support (this is mandated by federal law) and then it is discretionary with the judge to apply any effective date from date of service forward. You always get one-half of unreimbursed health care expenses, so that's no problem. As far as getting the medical expenses which were incurred before the motion was served, you have to look at your existing support order (even if support were set at zero there usually has to be an order for sharing med expenses). Now if there never was a support order in place (which would be unusual) then you can ask for support back to when the underlying case was filed years ago (but that would get complicated in what, if anything , it should be since the child was with the dad for serveral years).

In CA we have no college support and child support ends once the kid is 18 an finishes high school but in all cases never later than 19.

You have to check with local attorneys about costs and retainers. This is not a lawyer referral service and no one is here to solicit business. In CA most people would charge $2500-3500 as a retainer, just as an example.

What state are you in? As pointed out the difference in states can be fairly large. Some states stop support at 18 no matter what the child does about college and others will continue support to 21 if the kid is enrolled full time in school. Also did you pay support while the child was living with her father?

I am in the state of Ohio. And our shared parenting agreement says that we are to both have medical insurance and each pay for the things that occur while she is in our care. But he has taken advantage of this. Even when she stayed with him during the school year he didn't have insurance and would ask me to get immunizations for her and always would bring her to our drop off meeting point very sick. One time she was sick for 6 weekends in a row and I had to take her to urgent care. Part of the reason I have her now.

And no, neither of us paid child support to the other. The reason was we made similar amounts of money and I had her a lot of the time anyway. Actually more than what the shared parenting agreement had arranged for.

Okay, does he have a lawyer? You are going to need to document all of the times that you paid the full cost of medical care. That shouldn't really be a problem to recover half of but you have to have proper documentation of it.

I do have all the documentation since all the costs went through my own insurance and of course my insurance itself gets taken out every pay. And no, he doesn't have a lawyer, I'm pretty sure he would have filed an answer if he did.