Legal Question in Family Law in North Carolina

Jason,

I assume these are your children from the marriage. You have the same rights to custody as the mother. It depends on the circumstances of your case and I can't tell you how likely you are to succeed or not in a custody action without knowing the facts.

Your options are to work out a settlement areement with the mother or file an action for custody.

Its much better for your children if you and the mother can get along. If you want to fight, its going to be a very expensive long haul.

There are 2 types of custody: legal and physical. Legal custody refers to things like access to school and medical records and making decisions about the child (what religion, if any, the child should have, where the child will go to school, etc.) Legal custody is almost always joint unless one of the parents is unfit. To be unfit, a parent has to almost be abusive or neglectful. Even in cases where this is showm supervised visitation is still a possibility with the abusive parent.

Physical custody refers to where the child lives on a daily basis. Physical custody has to be with one parent with periods of partial custody or visitation with the other other parent, even though the time is equally divided.

Child support is a matter wholly unrelated to custody other than the fact that the non-custodial parent has to pay custody to the parent who has physical custody.

Support is based on the number of overnights that each parent has with the child and the child support guidelines. Courts will not deviate by more thn 15% from the guidelines unless the circumstances of the case justify it. But the courts have to come up with facts and you arguing for example that the support is too damn high will not carry much weight. If the custodial parent has at least 123 overnights, then worksheet A is used; if each parent has at least 123 overnights, thn worksheet B is used. Worksheet C is for the rare situations where each parent may have custody of a child. The guidelines take into account that the non-custodial parent spends time with the child. They are based on the combined gross monthly income of the parties. Unless one of you is an athlete or a movie star making phenomenal amounts of money (unlikely that you would be asking questions on law guru if that was the case), the guidelines apply in most cases. The mother does not have to work and is not assigned an earning capacity if the children are under 3 years of age.

Here is a link to the NC child support guidelines:

http://www.ncchildsupport.com/parents.jsp

I strongly suggest that you get a family law attorney in the county where the children are located or have lived for the last 6 months as that is where a child custody or child support action will be.