You may have every intention of fulfilling the child support obligation the New Jersey family court has ordered you to. However, extenuating circumstances in your personal life may affect your finances, which may subsequently affect your ability to afford this monthly payment. You must understand, though, that there may be serious consequences associated with consecutive months of nonpayment. For one, your relationship with your child may get severed. With that said, please read on to discover whether you have the potential to lose your custody rights if you stop meeting your child support obligation, and how a seasoned Morristown child custody lawyer at Graves Andrews, LLC, can help protect your privileges.
Can I lose my custody rights if I stop paying for child support?
Failure to pay child support alone is not enough grounds for the New Jersey family court to revoke your custody rights over your child. If anything, the court typically orders your wages to be garnished, your income tax refunds to be intercepted, and your assets to be seized to make up for these missed payments. What’s worse, though, is that they may have your driver’s, professional, and recreational licenses suspended, and even have you serve jail time.
Importantly, a failure to pay child support in conjunction with another offense may have the court closely consider taking away your custody. This may be especially applicable if the court finds that you have failed to take care of your child during your scheduled parenting time consistently or on a consecutive number of times. This may give them reason to believe that you, in a sense, have neglected or abandoned your child. Further, this is considered a form of parental unfitness. With this, they may conclude it is no longer in your child’s best interest to be placed under your care, even for supervised visitation time.
How can I get my custody rights back if I previously lost them?
You may have been going through a difficult time in your personal life, and you did not intend for it to affect your child so negatively in the aftermath. Well, you must help yourself before you can help your child. This means that you should take constructive measures to fix the issues that made the New Jersey family court take away your custody rights in the first place. This may mean paying the outstanding balance on your past-due child support payments. But also, setting up your living space to suit your child, should they be allowed to visit once again, and more.
Once you have made these positive measures, you may feel comfortable filing a post-judgment modification with the court to petition for a new child custody arrangement that includes you in it. Again, the driving message should be that reinstating your custody rights works in your child’s best interest. This matter may obviously be important to you, and you may want the best possible outcome. So please, do not fight this without a competent Morristown family law attorney in your corner. The team at Graves Andrews, LLC is here at your command.