Rights of Single Fathers
Tuesday, May 14th, 2019
Maybe you just weren’t that into each other. Perhaps alcohol was involved that night. Or, maybe you were together for a long time, but gradually drifted apart or fell in love with someone else. For whatever reason, these days, more and more parents are choosing to not get married even if they have a child together. […]
Read More »Emergency Custody Petitions: What are they, and when do we need them?
Wednesday, May 1st, 2019
It has been said that evil wins when good people stand by and do nothing. This rings true in the realm of child custody as well. Unfortunately, children everywhere live in homes where they are abused or neglected. Luckily, Tennessee law provides a process for others to intervene and secure custody of those children. One […]
Read More »Divorce and Adoption
Tuesday, April 30th, 2019
A reality in the world of family law is that families sometimes fracture through divorce. Families with adopted children are no different. This might be because new parents are not quite ready to deal with the stress of the adoption process and raising children. A marriage may have already been on the rocks when they […]
Read More »Children: Delinquent, Unruly, Neglected
Monday, April 15th, 2019
People across the state of Tennessee often find themselves struggling to provide the care that their children need. When parents are unable to provide that level of care for their children, for whatever reason, the state may step in. When this happens, the state classifies them as falling into three primary categories: delinquent, unruly or neglected […]
Read More »Juvenile Court: First Friday
Thursday, April 4th, 2019
When I started practicing family and juvenile law over twenty years ago, drugs were a factor in about half of the cases that I took that involved an abused or neglected child. Now, the opioid crisis is all over the news. Right behind it is the methamphetamine crisis. The cocaine crisis. As the years pass, the drugs […]
Read More »I’m not getting child support! Help!
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019
Child support can be a controversial topic, because many people who are ordered by the Court to pay it do not feel they should have to or that they can afford to. There are many different routes you can take if your children’s other parent does not pay child support, but unfortunately, most of these […]
Read More »Child support and parental rights
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019
A parent’s rights to their child may be terminated for several reasons. One of the most common reasons to terminate parental rights is abandonment by a willful failure to support (in other words, not paying child support). The party seeking to terminate the parent(s) rights for this reason must prove that for four consecutive months […]
Read More »Child Support in Tennessee
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019
In Tennessee, if someone has a child who is either under the age of eighteen or is disabled, and that child does not live with a parent full-time, then they have a legal duty to pay child support to the person whom the child lives with. The amount the supporting parent pays is determined by […]
Read More »Blended family problem solving
Friday, March 29th, 2019
Parenting is tough, whether you are a child’s biological parent, a step parent or a grandparent caring for your grandchildren. Blended and nontraditional families can provide a great model of functional family relationships. But, ensuring your blended family works well together can require some problem solving skills. What are some of the obstacles a blended family […]
Read More »What the drug crisis means for grandparents
Friday, March 29th, 2019
What does the drug crisis mean for grandparents? Many children are placed in households headed by relatives due to the large number of parents who struggle with drug addiction in Tennessee. Nearly 8 million children across the country lived in these non-nuclear households in 2017. Many of those households were headed by grandparents. There is […]
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