If you and your spouse in Minnesota are discussing a separation or a divorce and you have minor children together, you know that you will somehow have to figure out how to raise your kids together while no longer being married. One component to raising kids is paying for them and their associated needs. This may mean that one of you will be required to make child support payments.
In prior generations, it was all but expected that a divorced father would pay child support as well as spousal support. Today, however, that is not necessarily always the case. MarketWatch reports that in 2018, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers released findings from a study that showed more than half of all attorneys surveyed had seen an increase in the number of mothers ordered to pay child support payments after a divorce than in prior years.
Between 2015 and 2018, 54% of lawyers saw this trend. At the same time, 45% of the attorneys included in the survey said they had seen more wives required to make spousal support payments than before. Some of this could be due to general societal shifts as Pew Research indicates that women are the primary earners in 40% of households across the country today.
If you would like to learn more about societal shifts that are impacting divorce settlements and the agreements parents are making about how best to support their children, please feel free to visit the parents’ financial responsibility page of our Minnesota divorce and child support website.