I’d like to introduce you to attorney Michelle Berry she specializes in family law including divorce, alimony, child support and time sharing. Hey Michelle welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Tom. Hey Michelle back in the day the mom usually got the biggest chunk of visitation or custody with the kids these days is getting to be more and more 50/50 between the mother and the father and with that I got an email question from a woman who said, We are going to have 50/50 custody of the children, will I have to pay child support? How is child support determined when the mom and dad literally have the kids 50 percent of the times each?

Actually that’s a really great questions Tom because 50/50 time sharing is becoming more of the norm but child support is based on not just time sharing it’s also based on the incomes of the parties. So, in a perfect world is mom and dad both made the same amount of money each and they each had the children half the time each then there would be no child support going back and forth. But if you have one parent who is making a significant amount of income higher than the other then that parent is going to be paying some child support to the other parent just to sort of equalize out the situation living experience with a child at both households.

If they get 50/50 does that mean that the children are from one place from Sunday through Wednesday and another place from Thursday through Saturday or does it mean mom’s got them for two weeks and dad’s got it for two weeks?

Actually the beauty of the system is that the parents can be very flexible with that it’s always governed by what is in the best interest of the child or the children, Generally, if you’ve got a child who’s before school age they’re not even at the BB care Kindergarten yet you could have rolling weeks of time sharing where the child is with dad one week and mom the next week. And then the other situation could be if once the child is in school, hopefully the parents was close together, and then the child could say, they know they’re with mom and dad every Monday, Tuesday they know they’re with dad every Wednesday, Thursday they know they’re with the parent that they weren’t with the previous weekend Friday, Saturday, Sunday that weekend. So, that way again it’s based on what the child knows so that that child knows every Monday I’m staying the night over mom’s house every Wednesday I’m staying the night over dad’s house. Or it could be arranged any number of ways that best suits both the children’s school schedule and of course the parents work schedule.