When a baby is born in Texas and the parents are not married, the law does not automatically recognize the biological father as the child’s legal father. That is where the term “paternity” comes into the matter, and luckily, the Texas Family Code provides the framework to establish it.
“Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” The Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, 44:1.
Only 34 percent of children born in the United States in 2000 will be living with both parents in the same house by age 18, according to some projections. Further projections estimate only fourteen percent of fathers winning custody of their children, and only twenty-five percent of children of divorce seeing their father weekly or more.
Few issues within the domestic courts are as fraught with emotion and lead to prolonged litigation like those of disagreements over custody and parenting time. Good parents are often blinded by the emotions of the moment and fail to recognize the need to jointly parent their children. This leaves the courts to protect the parents’ equal rights to the children, but without a proper statutory framework, too many parents find parental equality an illusion when they step into a family law courtroom. This is in spite of the fact that recent studies and reports such as The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), the “Warshak Consensus” paper,1 and others have concluded that children are best served when parenting plans facilitate shared parenting and time between parents.
In most cases, a child support computation is statutorily defined so long as husband and wife make less than $15,000.00 in combined gross (pretax) income. However, in cases where monthly income is above this $15,000.00 combined amount, the computation of child support is left to the discretion of the court, and as such, will vary significantly on a case-by-case basis. While most guidelines for child support cases reflect a level of income that is likely to continue at the same levels existing at the time of the award, how much to award when those levels are likely to change, such as in the case of a professional athlete, is an open question requiring a different method of computation and additional considerations.
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