Comment: State should credit both parents who share custody

By Jim Clark

Over the last 30 years, we have seen the disastrous results of a decision the Washington state Legislature made in 1991 to stop providing automatic credits to parents who pay child support when they have more than 25 percent parenting time of their children. The determination of what is significant time is now left up to judicial discretion to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Approximately 58 percent of all Washington families share residential custody at least 25 percent of the time or longer according to 2016 court statistics. Instead of these families automatically sharing the total child support money from both parents in direct proportion to how much residential time the children spend at each parent’s home, judicial discretion now awards residential credit to only 7 percent of all families. For 51 percent of all families in Washington, one household receives all the child support money while the other household receives nothing.