WUWY INTERVIEW: Cathy Middleton Tackles Tough Topics: Child Support, Parenting Challenges, Domestic Violence + more

Published Jan 14, 2025, 7:00 PM

Cathy Middleton Tackles Tough Topics: Child Support, Parenting Challenges, Domestic Violence + more

What's up.

It's way up with Angela ye, and today we're doing something really special. I've always said that I always like to defer to experts when something is outside of my realm of expertise. And we have Kathy Middleton esquire with us. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me on the show.

I know you were just leaving court, so I appreciate you.

Yes, yes, anything to be here to help out the.

Cause making some time. So the other day we did have an ask ee caller. He left a voicemail because he was like he couldn't he was too emotional to even talk about it. And he was discussing issues that he was having with seeing his kids.

Let's play that call for her right now.

I want some advice.

How do I get my kids?

Big?

I ain't seeing my kids in three years before he smelt with my best man own the wed night. So that's why divorce happened. He's better because I found out that she slept with the best band and better do tell me how can I give my kids back?

Please? Okay, so you hear his question now. I tried to help him as best as I could. I told him the earlier that he gets a lawyer and establishes some type of visitation, the better it is for him. But I want you to answer as somebody who you deal with family planning, family law, you deal with child support, you deal with visitation, custody, all of those things. So what would you tell somebody he hasn't seen his children. He pays child support, but what can he do?

Well, Basically, Angela, you gave him good advice. That's the first thing that he needed to do was to reach out to contact legal counsel so that he could get a petition started for child custody and slash visitation. By doing that, what he will do is he'll start the process, the ball rolling towards getting access, some kind of access back to his children. Because what happened to him is he's become a victim of parental alienation. He's not seeing the children, he's not speaking with the children, no communication whatsoever. The longer the time lapses between the last time he saw the children and the next time he sees them, the likelihood shrinks by the year as to whether or not he will be able to come back into those children's lives. So, if his children are still young in the tender years, you know, under ten that kind of thing. The likelihood is very great that the court will issue in order for some kind of standard visitation schedule. It will probably be supervised visits because he has been away from the children's lives for a while, but they will put a regular schedule in place with the goal of having it moved from supervised to unsupervised bi weekly visitation with him. But if the children start reaching the age of preteenhood twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and they're saying, you know, I don't know this man, I don't want to be around him, then the court is going to have a difficult time forcing children to have visitation with somebody that they really don't know, who's actually a stranger to him. Today, his job is to really do as much as he can now to get the ball rolling in court and get a case started.

So if the child, say, let's say the kid is seven years old, and they're like, I don't want to see my dad, I don't know him, I'm scared of him. My mom has told me awful things about him, then what does the court do.

Well, I have a case like that right now in King's County, and so what the court has done is the initial thing that they did was they established a supervised visitation schedule which was being supervised by a social worker who was attempting to reconnect or reunite the child with the father. The problem with these visits is that they were virtual visits, so there was a lot of room for mismanagement in terms of the mother kind of kind of poisoning the child against the father, saying that the child was not interested in the visits and that sort of thing. And when the court realized that that was not a suitable way of trying to reunite these parties, they then moved to a therapeutic supervised visit schedule where we now have an actual psychiatrist who is overseeing the visitation, counseling the parties, dealing with the issues that the child has as a result of having been away from the father for an extended period of time, as well as the issues that the father's having as a result of being disconnected with the child. And so we're seeing a lot more progress take place now the parties have been the father and son has at least been able to see each other and be in each other's presence. It may be within the confines of a doctor's office, but at least the process is beginning to take place for reunification.

You know, I've heard people tell stories about how now they realize growing up, my mom was the one that was blacking things from happening and me having in a relationship with my father, and you don't want that to be the case later on in life. But a lot of women did also call up while this topic was happening. And here is what one woman had to say as she left a message.

This is a very complicated and such a situation, especially when it comes to survivors and victors of domestic violence.

It depends on a situation.

Now, all right, so how does a domestic violence situation affect a father's visitation or custody? Because she said, what if there's domestic violence of love, then what happens?

Okay, Well, we often at my office as well, have domestic violence cases, and we have to navigate the murky warders of being able to maintain the integrity of the child's relationship with the father and the father's relationship with the child even in the midst of a domestic violence order protection situation. In New York state. What we tend to do is if there are issues of domestic violence and it's an order protection case, a family offense petition has been filed, the court will usually issue an order protection that has a carve out, and the carve out what that does is it allows a father to be able to continue to have consistent visits with their child even while they're abiding by the terms and conditions of an order of protection. So if an order protection requires a father to stay away from the mother, he still can be able to have access to the child. Let's say if there's visitation, bi weekly visitation will take place drop off and pick up, and say a police precinct or maybe another relative will facilitate the drop off and pick up of the child, and the father will be able to then take the child to their home and continue visitation as usual and return the child at the end of the visit.

Now that could be a real issue.

Though.

Let's say a woman is frightened because she's like, he beat me up, he put his hands on me, and I'm not comfortable with my child being around somebody that has these anger issues.

Then what happens, Well, the court generally speaking, will look at where the violence was directed towards So if it was directed towards the woman and only the woman, the view of the court is that it should not be the case that we now cut off all relationship that the father would have had with any of his children. What they will do is say, Okay, that may be an adult issue, and so we're going to try to maintain the integrity of the child parent relationship to the best extent possible. Okay, If, however, the domestic violence involves the children as well, then what may happen is the visitation with the parent and child may be a supervised visitation schedule. So there's going to be parameters placed around when and how and where those visitations can the visitation can take place, and how long it can take place.

What if your as a mother, let's say your child's father beats the kids and you don't like that, but that's his form of discipline. What happens in a situation like that where you're like, look, this is abuse.

Well, New York State, we're a corporal punishment state, which means that a parent is allowed to engage in a certain amount of corporal punishment against their child. If you're going to do a paddle on the bat on the backside with an open palm, that's acceptable. If you're talking about, you know, beating a child within an inch of their lives, that's not acceptable. So it depends on what the corporal punishment is. Does it go over the line to actually be defined as child abuse or does it stay within the purview of what is acceptable on the New York State guideline.

Wow, okay, we actually have one of your current clients on the line. He wanted to call in and talk about his case and what he's been going through.

Hey, Darrow, what's up.

I'm a father. I have two sons, but my oldest son, he's always been living. We used to live together, he and his mother and myself, and you know, after a few years we went out separate way, but I was still in his mother's life, helping out with her daughters, but also definitely being president for my son, like I was a PTA president of the school. I've been the chairperson for the Sea Pad committee, always been in terns and engaged with the education and cultivation. So he's been living under two groups, which you know, I realized is very difficult, you know for a young a young boy to be in the middle of. But it's been a battle and I felt like it was an unnecessary battle. So he's been living under my roof where I'm also financially responsible for his whereabouts, transization, food, you know, just going out sport, just being financially responsible. And the court case did not recognize that or acknowledge that, you know, they actually held a judgment against me. And it's you know, it's been a really wild chain of events and I just would like to put this behind me because it's really and I will say I allowed it to I didn't know how to handle this, hindered me financially, and that's why I needed Kathy to represent me after ten years.

Wow, it took you ten years.

No, he went through the experience in his odyssey for ten years.

Take ten years to come to you finally find me.

And Daryl's is a case in which you have a father who is living with the child. The child was living in his household, but Daryl had an order for support to pay support to the mother who's living somewhere else.

Wow.

And so you know, you can't bite the apple twice. You know, you can't squeeze blood out of a turn up two times. So what we had to do was to go in. What we're fighting right now is trying to get the child support order modified to reflect the fact that for at least a year or more, this child had been residing under Darrel's roof and being provided for by him, being fed and clothed while the mother was collecting child support.

Right, she should be paying him.

Touse Supplorier, right, exactly, she should have been paying him. And then the other issue is Daryl has an order in place in which the court imputed income to him based upon what the law believes he should have been earning, despite the fact that in reality he's been looking for employment but just has not been able to a fine employment that would be enough to provide for the order such that it is. So he's fallen behind, he's in arrears, and those reels keep snowbawling.

That message up your credit exactly, it could garnish your checks.

Fanactly. He's on jail for that.

You can go to jail for that, you ultimately can. And so his life has been financially destroyed, and so piece by piece we're trying to reconnect the pieces to the puzzle and get his life back on track, Darrel?

Where you hesitant because, as you know, some people are looking at it like lawyers can be expensive and I'm already behind.

I'm sorry say that again.

Well you're also looking at it like lawyers can be expensive and you already were behind on these payments that you shouldn't even have had to pay.

Oh yeah, absolutely absolutely, And what they called pro state litigan, I was there was no lawyer that would take my case because because of what Council Middleton said, you know, like there were no lawyers who were trying to take that case at all. Oh yeah, it was going to be a further expense on top of that, and then just putting my head on the shopping block if I had to go in there and represent myself.

Oh no, but I don't know exactly. Okay.

Well, I'm glad that you guys connected and that this has been working for you. We've been hearing amazing things about Kathy Middleton.

She's great, she's great, she's tuned in.

All right, Well, thank you, Darren. Good luck to you.

I hope everything is working at I can't even imagine how stressful.

This has been.

Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate you.

Okay, so now let me ask you this, miss Middleton. After all this happens, will he be able to get back child support?

Like?

How does that happen? And what about the money that he's paid up until this point.

That's one of the biggest questions that people ask when they find themselves in a situation where they they've paid what they shouldn't have paid. What will the court system do for them to get their money back? Sadly, the family court system and the office with Child Support Enforcement will not do anything. They won't look the finger to help a father, usually the father who's paying the child's work. They won't do anything to help them. But they'll recommend that they do is to go to civil court and file either small claims case or civil court case if the amount is exceeding twenty five to five thousand dollars or less than twenty five thousand, so he will have to go on his own through another court system, wow, and another case so hard in order to get reimbursement.

All right, now we have another call it because, like I said, this day, when we had this ask ye, the phone lines blew up.

There were so many people leaving messages.

So we have a few, because I know that there's certain things that come to you repeatedly.

All right, here's another question.

Yeah, Hi, my name is Andrew English. I just heard on the radio about you guys talking about fathers that have been alienated from their children. I left the mother of my children when my oldest son was about five and my youngest was about three because we argued every single day. And I have not seen my oldest son since he was five years old. I pay child support every single month. She doesn't let me have phone conversations. I don't get pictures of my kids. I don't get communication from my children or anything. And I took her to court after finding her because she disappeared with my children for quite some time, and after locating her and taking her to court because her family is very wealthy and I couldn't afford but the least expensive attorney. I was forced to take supervised visitation, and my oldest son refused to see me, and my heart breaks every single day of my life because of it.

Oh.

I heard the emotion in his voice. Yeah, you can hear it when he was discussing that. Okay, so what would you say to this man?

Well, for him, I would say to continue with the supervised visits. If he has an order that allows him to have at least supervised visits, he has something that allows him to continue to maintain some kind of connection to his child. The child may not want to participate in a visit, and it may be necessary that those supervised visitations become now therapeutic supervised visitation, so that there's a psychologist that comes into the room and helps to draw the bridge between the father and the child and do whatever is necessary in order to make that happen. But he is at all times to continue the visitation because if he fails to, he's basically going to lose his job.

It's just giving it up. Yeah, you're also an author, so I see you have this book. Boy at that child support, So talk to me about this book.

So this book was written for men who are struggling with child support and paternity issues, which is a big issue that we have here in New York State and throughout the country, and for those individuals who, much like the caller indicated, that they don't have the economic resources to retain counsel, but still want to have good solid information as to what to do and how best to navigate the family court system and the Office for Child Support Enforcement. This book is a good guide to help that person find out how to manage a child's work case, how to protect their rights with regard to child support, the things that are necessary to look out for so that they don't end up being in a situation where they're they're drowning and child supporter rears and possibly end ending up going to jail.

Right, because that can catch up to you very quick, very easily. Yeah, you can definitely pile on.

Yeah.

Now, one thing that the listeners said also that had a question that she he couldn't find his kids, he couldn't locate them. What about their fathers that want to track down their kids, but they have no idea where this woman is living, maybe she even moved left the state, whatever, Right, how can they then fast track being able to see their kids or even find out where their kids are living well?

And that's an excellent question, And I mean, my first response is to hire a good investigator to find out that information for you. But many people don't have the economic resources to do that, right. So that's one of the things that we covered in this book was there are a number of things that fathers can do to track down the mothers of their children and the children themselves. And the best way to do that is if you have an actual child support order in place and the Office of Child Support Enforcement is collecting, then there's access to the state and federal locator search, okay, And that's a free search that the court can do for the father. The clerk's office can do for that father to find out where these checks are going so that if they're going to let's say George or a Florida someplace like that, they'll be able to track down what the address is so that he could then find the mother for purposes of filing a case for custody or visitation. Now, that is only an opportunity that's available for someone who does not have an order protection. If there's an order protection that's been issued against a father, then the mother's address is going to be considered confidential and the court will never release it for any purpose. And also sometimes clerks will not release the address even to individuals who don't have an order protection, and that case you may need legal counsel to help you get that information.

Now, another thing that I said when the listener call that sparked this whole conversation was communicating right with your child's mother. Just I was like, just be really careful about what it is that you're writing, if you're texting, sending emails I agree or whatever, because those things I was like, always just look at it like this could come up in court and this could be used against me. What would you say to people? I know they have apps where you can communicate through an app with each other, So can you talk about that a little bit as an alternative?

What we have apps? The court system uses a number of them. There's a free one called app Close Parenting App. There's Our Family Wizard is an app that I think the fee is about one hundred and fifty dollars per year. The benefit of these apps is that what they do is they allow a parent to be able to communicate and keep to maintain the integrity of what the communication is, so that if there's a very bad relationship between the parties and their communication skills are lacking, and there's a lot cursing and threats of bodily harm and that kind of thing, those kinds of apps you can't erase any kind of threat that you make on that app So if a guy's got a mother who's making threats to him all the time, she can't you know, text him and make a threat and then erase it in the way that she could on the regular text message. And so he's got evidence in that case to be able to bring the court to show that, Okay, I'm being verbally abused here, this is the evidence that shows that she's verbally abusing me every time I try to reach out to find out about the well being of my child. And that's the benefit of those Okay, there's a number of them all right.

Now, we do have another person who left a message. I want to make sure we at least get to a couple of them. And then I have some more questions. Here's this next caller.

I get to see my daughter only Thursday to Saturdays. I drop her all Sundays, but the other days Monday, Tuesday's Wednesdays, I cannot call her. I cannot speak to her, not because I have anything with the law or anything, but my wife, well my ex wife won't allow me to. Even for New Years, I try to call my daughter. I have to text us just to hey, please, can I speak to my daughter? Just to tell her Happy New Years. It's three years old. I've never set the New Years with her, not even a response to like your back.

So is there a way to go to court to be able to botnate holidays?

Well, I'm afraid to go to the court because everybody I speak to says that I'm going to lose the case because it's a mother The mother always wins, So I don't even want to take my cancers with that.

People do say that the mother always wins when it comes to course. So what do you say to that?

Okay, I would say that he's getting some bad advice. He needs to contact the lawyer right away, because if he contacts an attorney, an attorney will lay out the law to him in very clear terms that as a father, he's got a right to have consistent visits with his child. He's getting some visitation based upon what he's saying, but it's not sufficient based upon what the law provides. And so under the law, he's supposed to be getting alternative holidays. He should be getting alternative weekends on those days when the child is not in his home or visiting with him. He's supposed to be able to have either telephonic or FaceTime visits with the child. There should be like an hour set aside, and most of my cases will have like seven o'clock every evening the father is allowed to either have a FaceTime call or telephone call with the child. That's good, yes, And if there's like if the child is spending Christmas with the mother, the child will spend New Years with the father, and you know, you'll go odd years, even years in terms of alternating holidays. There's usually going to be a week long visit that a father will have in the summertime. Sometimes it's both in the months of July and the month of August so that he can be able to take the child on vacation. It's in Disney World at someplace like that. But this this call clearly is not getting meaningful visitation privileges, not in amount that he should be having. So he should, you know, pay no attention to what he's being told.

Contact that a mom would be excited that the father would want to step up. On the on the flip side of that, what can a mom do who's child's father doesn't step up and doesn't provide other than child support, because you know, money is what it is, but there's nothing like quality time. And nobody wants to see their kids sad or upset when daddy didn't come get them.

What would you say a mother can do?

What are her rights as far as trying to enforce a connection.

I have quite a few cases like that right now as well. And it's more difficult on that side, because it's harder to make a man do what he doesn't want to do than it is to make a mother, you know, participate in the visitation schedule. The best that she can do is to try to maintain a strong relationship with him communication wise, and keep the doors of communication open so that he understands that when he fails to visit with the child, if he says he's going to come and then doesn't come, it has a dilatorious impact, a negative impact upon that child. That he's disappointing the child, and the child is going to begin to see him a certain way and paint him in a negative light. And sometimes I think that's enough to wake up a man to say, you know, I don't want my child looking at me, you know, sideline and thinking that you know, I'm not a truthful person. A lot of times that'll wake them up and shake them into doing the right thing. But other than that, there's no law that will force them to say, come and participate in visitation.

What if, as a mom, you're concerned about the environment. What if you're like, I don't like the environment that the people that this person's going to have my kid around.

What can you do in that situation?

The best thing to do is if the case is in court, is to ask the court to do a court ordered investigation of his living arrangements. And that's done for free. It's done under the Administration for Children's Services. They'll send a social worker out to his home. They'll speak to any interview anyone who's in the home, including him, the father, and anyone else who resides in the home. They'll go through a thoroughs check of the home, through the refrigerator, through the cabinets, through drawers in the bedrooms to make sure that the environment is suitable and safe for a child to be able to it in. So there's a lot that can be done there. You should definitely speak up and say something about it.

What about for people who move out of state, like, let's just say yeah, relocation cases yeah. The mother is like, look, we're getting out of here. New York is expensive. We want to have a better life somewhere else. And the father is like, damn, how am I going to see my kid if you just up and move. What happens in a situation like that.

So in New York State, what we do is we under the Court of Appeals. There's a lot of cases that have come down recently in which the court has said that where there are situations where a mother is relocating out of the state for economic purposes. Let's say her job has transferred her or she's gotten an offer from a new company that's going to provide her with a larger income. The court generally speaking will allow they will permit this to take place for her to relocate, but she really has to be able to show that there's actual substantial increase and substant improvement in her financial situation that's going to inure to the benefit of the child. If she can't establish that case, then the court is going to say, no, we're not going to grant the relocation.

Wow, that's going to make things really hostile exactly between people. All right, Well, this one's all fantastic information and I just want people to feel encouraged because I know and time wise, what's the process?

Because I know it can be really hard to.

Get a court date even so Let's just say somebody is just starting their journey, they haven't even contacted a lawyer, and they're like, you know what I heard Kathy Middleton esquire on way up with Angela.

Yee.

I'm going to reach out to her office and see what I can do. I haven't seen my kids in two years. How long would you say that process, normally in general, would take just to even go to court.

It depends. It could take anywhere from six months to a year. Some cases can be a little longer and some even a little shorter, depending upon the circumstances surrounding the case. So someone contacts me at my office, my number is one eight hundred eight one eight three to three FAM Law one. That's one eight three to three FAM Law one. If they contacted me today and we got them into the office and we retained them, we would probably be looking at a court appearance about six weeks from now. And you make it a temporary order for visitation in place pending a final determination of custody. You make it any number of things. You make it a reduction in your child support. Those cases move relatively quickly through the court system. Also depends upon which burrow that you're located in. Some burrows move more quickly than others.

How do you get a reduction in child support?

Just well, in New York stay if there's a change in circumstances that can qualifies under New York state law, and an unanticipated change in your financial circumstances that is at least results in at least fifteen percent reduction in your income from what it used to be when the order was initially issued, you could be entitled to a doward modification in your order for support.

You've got to handle it, though.

You got to handle it.

You got to handle it.

Yeah, the sooner the better, and that is one of the things that we are really speaking about today. Handle it. You might have been letting something drag out for years. Maybe you thought it was going to get better over time. Shall calm down, you know, maybe our relationship will improve. We've seen it happen with other people, but it's not improving. You really do have to be proactive and getting things done. The sooner the better, Okay. You also though, work with women, so I don't want people to think this is just about men. You do also work with women and helping them, because you also have a book helping women child support.

Get that child support? Yes, and so we half of my clients are women, and I help women with child support, paternity, custody issues, domestic violence, divorce. You know, we're equal Opportunity office. We discriminated against no one.

Yes, this just came up because of a call that we had exit and I do feel like men it's harder for them people to get help, Like people don't take into consideration people who want to be in their kids' lives. True, and there's some type of hinderance there, And so I don't want guys to feel like I just give up. This is too difficult, it's not going to happen. I can't deal with this woman, and I'd rather just let it go. You know, you gotta make it happen, and it might be hard now, but hopefully once you get everything established, because I think that's important too. So if you can't handle it amongst each other through mediation, you might have to just go to court and get something that is solid.

And you may end up in a fight, but your child should be worth or children should be worth the fight.

You know, people would be like, fight for your kid.

And you can't just pop up to somebody's house because people would be like, yeah, that was me. I would show up to the house and I would demand this. You can't do that might get arrested. You might get arrested that it'll be even harder for you to see a kid later.

True exactly.

So let's go the right.

Route people, and it might be alonger road, but it'll be more beneficial exactly for everybody involved. All right, Well, I appreciate you so much for coming. I know there's going to be a ton of people that are going to be hitting you up. But you do have books available for purchase too, in case somebody is like, Okay, I need to read up on this some more too for myself exactly exactly.

And so they can reach me at one eight three to three FAMI law one, or they could visit my website which is www dot Kathy Middleton dot com.

I saw you went to Howard, Yes we did, and Temple, yes.

Temple, Okay, we love that.

Yes indeed, all right, Well, thank you so much Again, it does matter who your attorney is and who represents you, somebody that really cares. And we've heard some positive responses from people who worked with you, and I gonna tell how passionate you are just from our conversation after so thank you, Thank you for this valuable information.

Well