630-584-5550
Recent Blog Posts
Navigating Social Media While Your Divorce Is Pending
If you are going through a divorce, be careful with how you use social media. If you are the type of person who shares every thought and moment of your day with your followers, now is the time to start tapering off your social media usage and getting yourself used to a more private existence. Once you post something on social media, you cannot control where it ends up or how it might be used later. When you are working through the divorce process, keeping tight control on your social media profiles will help you keep your divorce and any “ammunition” your former partner can use against you under control.
Below is a list of what to do, and what not to do with your social media profiles while your divorce is pending. For additional advice tailored to your specific case, speak with an experienced divorce lawyer.
What to Do on Social Media
Take a closer look at your current privacy settings to see who can view your posts. Consider making your privacy settings more stringent and removing friends and followers who you do not want to have access to your content. Remember, though, that removing somebody from your followers list cannot completely prevent him or her from seeing what you post – all it takes is one of your remaining followers taking a screenshot of your content and sharing it with the follower you removed.
The Four Parenting Styles: Which Are You?
In the 1960s, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three distinct parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Later, researchers Maccoby and Martin theorized that the parenting style identified as permissive by Baumrind has two types, indulgent and uninvolved. Identifying and understanding your parenting style can help you co-parent with your former partner and relate to your child more effectively. When the court develops a parenting agreement, it considers the child’s relationship with each parent and each parent’s ability to provide for the child’s needs, which can both be tied to the parent’s parenting style. Keep in mind that very few parents fit neatly into one of the boxes below. Rather, these types are the pillars of a parenting style spectrum, and nearly all parents fall somewhere between two or more of these pillars.
Authoritarian
Authoritarian parents are commonly known as “strict parents.” Rather than discussing why rules and boundaries exist, these parents expect their children to obey without question. Authoritarian parents often have high expectations of their children and generally use punishment as a means to encourage compliance with these expectations and control their children’s behavior.
Grandparents’ Rights in Illinois
Many grandparents and parents are familiar with the term “grandparents’ rights,” but do not fully understand it as a concept. It does not mean that grandparents automatically have the right to spend time with their grandchildren or seek custody of them by the virtue of being grandparents. What it means is that under certain specific circumstances, grandparents have the right to petition the court for visitation with their grandchild. Grandparents’ rights vary from state to state, but they exist in some form in every state. They are an important part of family law, the legal area that governs family relationships.
Circumstances Under Which Grandparents can Sue for Visitation with a Child
In Illinois, grandparents may file petitions for visitation with their grandchildren if an “unreasonable denial of visitation” has occurred. This could be in conjunction with a child’s parents’ divorce, the issuance of a parenting plan, or because there is a reason why the parent through whom the grandparent would access the child cannot facilitate their relationship. This could be because the child’s parent is incarcerated, deceased, legally incompetent, or has been reported as missing to law enforcement. Typically, it is easier for grandparents to be granted visitation rights when one of the child’s parents is unavailable to maintain their relationship with the child.
What Is Contempt of Court in Relation to Divorce Orders?
When the court enters an order, all parties named in the order are required to comply with its terms. Your divorce settlement likely included a few orders, such as a parenting plan, a property division order, a child support order, and a spousal maintenance order. Willfully refusing to comply with one or more of these orders is an act of contempt of court. It is important to note that in order for an action to be contempt of court, the offender must willfully, knowingly violate his or her court order. Failure to comply with a court order for reasons beyond the individual’s control is not contempt of court.
Any refusal to comply with a court order is contempt of court. Following a divorce, the following actions may be deemed contempt of court. Penalties for refusing to comply with a court order include fines, wage garnishment, and the suspension of your driver’s license.
Failing to Make Required Payments
If you are required to pay child support or spousal maintenance, you must pay the amount that your order requires you to pay when you are required to pay it. If you feel your former partner or your child’s lifestyle has changed to the point that your original support amount is no longer necessary, discuss the possibility of having your order modified with an experienced lawyer. This is also what you should do if you can no longer afford to make your required payments.
Does Divorce Affect Boys and Girls Differently?
The short answer is yes, boys and girls generally react to their parents’ divorces in different ways. Like nearly every other question about divorce, though, a more accurate answer is that every case is different, and every child is different, so a parent cannot expect his or her child to react to his or her divorce in a specific way based solely on the child’s gender. Instead, a child’s gender can be used as a guideline to anticipate the way he or she might react to the divorce process and a way to understand why the child feels the way he or she does.
Your Child Is More than His or Her Gender
There are a lot of factors that can play a role in how your child will react to your divorce, such as:
- Your child’s age;
- Your child’s gender;
- The circumstances of the divorce; and
- Your child’s personality.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology found no difference between how adolescent boys and adolescent girls react to their parents’ divorces. This could be because in general, divorce has less of an impact on adolescents than it has on younger children.
Waiving the Right to Spousal Maintenance in Illinois
Under some states’ laws, individuals may waive their right to seek spousal maintenance in their divorces. When an individual or couple chooses to waive this right, they typically include it in their prenuptial agreement. Illinois is not one of these states. In Illinois, spousal maintenance is a right just like child support is a right. However, there are limits to this right. Unless the couple agrees to it, a judge cannot order unallocated spousal maintenance after their divorce. In other words, a judge must include a specific dollar figure in a couple’s spousal maintenance order.
How Is Spousal Maintenance Determined in Illinois?
On January 1, 2015, Illinois’ current spousal maintenance law went into effect. This formula replaced the older way of determining spousal maintenance, which was a set of factors that courts could consider at their discretion to determine an appropriate maintenance amount and period of time over which it would be paid. Now, spousal maintenance is calculated according to a formula that takes both partners’ gross incomes and specific percentages of each to determine an appropriate maintenance amount, not unlike Illinois’ child support formula. The spousal maintenance formula is as follows:
Children's Effect on Marriage
As a parent, there is a lot of pressure on you to keep any “negative” thoughts about parenthood to yourself. But the truth is, raising children is hard. This is backed up by statistics: in any marriage, the couple’s satisfaction in the marriage declines during its first few years. For couples with children, this decline is twice as steep as the decline childless couples face.
This does not mean you should forgo parenthood. What it means is that having children can put an immense pressure on your marriage and if you are not proactive about anticipating child-related conflicts and resolving them in a healthy manner, this pressure can push you to divorce.
Children and Divorce Statistics
There are many different factors that can impact a couple’s likelihood of divorcing. Some of these factors have to do with the couple’s children and their positions on raising children:
- Having daughters increases a couple’s chance of divorcing while having sons reduces it. Unmarried couples who have a son are more likely to marry than unmarried couples who have a daughter, and when a couple has two daughters, their likelihood of divorcing is 43.1 percent versus 36.9 percent if they have two sons;
Stepparent Adoptions in Illinois
There are many ways to add a child to your family. Some couples conceive and birth biological children while others adopt children from the foster system, through private adoptions, and from other countries. When an individual with children marries, whether for the first time or after a divorce, his or her spouse may adopt the children and become their legal stepparent. This is known as a stepparent adoption.
A Child Cannot Have Three Legal Parents
One of the most important points to understand about stepparent adoption is that a child cannot have three legal parents. Although many children and adults refer to a parent’s spouse as their stepparent, a stepparent only has legal rights to a child if he or she completes the stepparent adoption process, which is only possible if the child’s other biological parent voluntarily gave up his or her parental rights or if these rights were terminated by the court. Otherwise, a parent’s spouse can build a strong relationship with a child, but without the legal rights that come with being an actual parent.
Why Second Marriages Have Higher Risk of Divorce
Statistically, an individual’s second or subsequent marriage is more likely to end in divorce than his or her first marriage. There are a few reasons for this. Although every marriage and by extension, every divorce, is unique, the same patterns and conflict sources tend to appear in second and later marriages across demographic groups.
It is not impossible to have a lasting second or subsequent marriage, but it does often take more work than a first marriage requires. Below are three common issues that drive remarried couples to divorce.
People Enter Second Marriages with More Baggage
Marriages end for a lot of reasons. A few common reasons include:
- Poor conflict resolution skills;
- Infidelity;
- Poor communication skills;
- Domestic violence;
- Financial conflicts;
- Conflicts about how to raise their children; and
- Different lifestyle expectations.
Does your Job Increase your Risk of Divorce?
Certain jobs and career paths are correlated with a higher rate of divorce than others. These are not necessarily the most physically stressful jobs like construction, nor are they jobs that tend to keep individuals away from home for prolonged periods of time, like the military. Many of the jobs cited as having a high divorce rate are jobs that are mentally exhausting and put employees into positions where they are in close physical contact with others, either clients or colleagues.
There are many factors that increase or decrease a couple’s likelihood of divorcing. Each partner’s career is only one of these factors. The couple’s education and income levels, whether they have children, how old they were when they married, and the income disparity between the partners are also indicators of whether a marriage will end in divorce.
Which Careers have the Highest Divorce Rates?
The following five careers are statistically the top five for divorces:
630-584-5550