How exactly does alimony and child support work, and why does it seem like it’s always men who pay it to women, and never the other way around?
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Mostly:
1. Men tend to earn more.
2. Following many divorces the mother frequently ends up as the primary caregiver.
3. In marriages where one parent leaves the workforce to take care of homemaking it’s normally the wife.
Item 1 means that even when there’s 50:50 shared custody some child support is owed to the mother so she can provide for the child equally as possible while she has custody.
Item 2 means that most of the time the mother has most/all of the custody and this carried most/all of the responsibilities for meeting the child’s need. This means that mostly the father is responsible for paying child support to offset those to something approximating 50:50, though often it’s far less than that.
Item 3 often only kicks in after a lengthy marriage and where the wife has spent a prolonged period out of the workforce, which tanks her earning potential, while in exchange her acting as homemaker has allowed the husband to maximize his. The amount and length of alimony is normally tied to the length of marriage, how long the spouse was out of the workforce, and the working spouses income.
If/when any of 1-3 is reversed, with the father being primarily caregiver/homemaker/income earner the wife can end up owing child support/alimony, but such circumstances are uncommon so you don’t see them often.
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