El Paso Family Law Blog

In El Paso, service members and their spouses are well aware of the extra care a marriage may need to avoid the possibility of military divorce. Military personnel can expect long work hours and the possibility of a short-notice deployment, so people in the service may experience marriage strain through no fault of their own. However, military members also tend to hold established institutions in higher regard than the general populace, and that goes for marriage, too.

While divorce is sometimes the best option for service members, the military divorce rate continues to remain lower than that of the civilian sector. That fact has prompted a study into the reasons why military marriages appear to be more resilient.

As El Paso residents can imagine, when children are diagnosed with a terminal illness, the parents may experience a devastating emotional strain. However, readers in Texas may be interested to hear that, according to a new study, a child's terminal illness does not necessarily increase the parents' risk of divorce.

For years it has been believed that a child being diagnosed with cancer or another severe illness was linked to divorce. But according to a new study in which 47,000 married couples with children participated, that isn't necessarily the case. Some 2,450 children who had been diagnosed with cancer over a span of 17 years were matched against some 44,853 children who did not have cancer. The data can thus be broken down to 18 cancer-free children per one child diagnosed with cancer.

El Paso residents should be aware that failure to pay child support is taken very seriously in the state of Texas. A large roundup of parents said to be delinquent on child support payments brought 24 arrests in a single day. The sweep effort focused solely on those who had outstanding warrants for failing to meet their child support obligations. Working in conjunction with the Texas Attorney General's Child Support Division, several counties across Texas participated in the campaign.

The Texas Attorney General emphasized that child support is a moral and legal obligation of parents, and by collecting delinquent payments, the state is ensuring that young children in Texas are able to have the resources they need to be healthy.

Texans who have child support concerns may be interested in a recent out-of-state court ruling that required a father to foot the entire bill for his child's college education. The case highlights what many people go through when a non-custodial parent's income increases significantly after a child support order is made. The couple involved was divorced in 1993, and at that time, the father's child support payments were set at $175 per week for two children.

At the time of the separation, the man was only making an annual income of $29,000. By 2008, his income had drastically increased to approximately $250,000 per year, although the child support for the two children stayed the same. The woman's income remained below $40,000 per year the entire time.