One night when he got home from work, Sarah was on the couch crying. She told him she couldn’t take it anymore. When her husband finally saw what his actions were doing to his second marriage, he called up his ex that very night and they worked out an agreement over the phone in about ten minutes.
In Sally’s first year of marriage to Abe, who had four children, his ex sued for more child support because she figured now that Abe was remarried, he would be able to pay more money. The courts demanded he increase his support payments, and the stepmother had to support her husband who was paying so much to the ex that he could barely contribute to their lives together.
In most states, a stepparent is not obligated to pay for the support of stepchildren. And in fact, some stepparents whose marriages end in divorce have been awarded settlements for the money they spent on stepchildren during the course of the marriage. According to Margorie Engel, however, some states obligate you to financially support your stepchildren if they live in your household.
State laws often change, so make sure to find out your legal financial obligation to your stepchildren where you live. Usually, however, a stepmother’s financial involvement in the lives of her stepchildren is completely voluntary.
So in some states, when a parent tries to sue for more child support money because a spouse has remarried and has a new standard of living, the court will not award money because the child support is based on the standard of living the children had during the first marriage.
However, because every judge, every court, and every state does it differently, there have been cases—as some stepmoms have discovered—in which the stepmother is not ordered to pay, but because the father’s financial situation is perceived to have changed for the better owing to her income, the court demands that he pay more, even if he’s not making any more money than he did at the time of the divorce.
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