Understanding Legal Rights for Stay-At-Home Dads
I’d like to talk to you about an issue that’s becoming increasingly prevalent, stay-at-home dads. Not as many as there are stay-at-home moms, but increasingly there are more and more fathers who choose to make that choice.
The thing you should know about that legally is it is a legitimate choice, but under the law, if you’re in a divorce situation or if you are in a paternity situation, the law treats it the same way it would for others. So no, there’s no difference between the way the law treats stay-at-home dads and stay-at-home mothers. It’s implicated in several different portions of a divorce litigation or a paternity issue.
Legal Implications for Stay-At-Home Dads
So for divorce, if you’ve been a stay-at-home dad during the marriage and your spouse was the one working outside the home, you might be eligible to be paid spousal support. You need an experienced lawyer to consider whether or not you could be owed spousal support on the back end of your divorce.
The second issue is if it’s a paternity case and you weren’t married to the mother, being a stay-at-home dad has a different kind of problem. You will be entering a child support order in either case, divorce or paternity, and your income will be considered.
Consult with a Family Law Lawyer
The lawyer needs to actively consider how to defend you from the claim that you are willfully unemployed or underemployed, and frankly, a woman in those situations is subject to the same kind of collateral attack in order to say that she should be working or that you should be working so that you can pay child support or the accusation that you aren’t working simply to avoid paying child support or spousal support.
So if you make that life choice to be a stay-at-home dad, then you need to make sure that you’re consulting with a good and experienced family law lawyer to make sure that that fact is not used against you in court in any way.
Contact a Tulsa Divorce Attorney for Men
If you have any questions about that or any other family law matter, I am a Tulsa divorce attorney for Northeastern Oklahoma. You can find my contact information at tulsafathersrights.lawyer or Dads.Law and I would be happy to consult with you.
