All in the Family: Examining Louisiana's Faulty Birth Order-Based Discrimination
| Author | Taylor Gay |
| Pages | 295-324 |
All in the Family: Examining Louisiana’s Faulty
Birth Order-Based Discrimination
INTRODUCTION
Parents should not have favorite children.1 However, the
Louisiana Legislature forces parents to play favorites when a
parent owes child support to multiple families.2 In multiple family
situations, the obligor3 owes one child support order to the “first
family” and another child support order to the “second family,”
and, if applicable, to other subsequent families.4 Regrettably,
Louisiana has chosen the worst available method to calculate child
support for multiple families.
Although every child is entitled to support from his or her
parents,5 children from prior families receive more financial
support than do children from subsequent families under
Louisiana’s current system for calculating child support.6 This
Copyright 2012, by TAYLOR GAY.
1. See Joshua D. Foster & Ilan Shrira, When Parent s Play Favorites:
Preferring One Child over Another, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (Jan. 10, 2009),
available at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissus-in-all-us/200
901/when-parents-play-favorites (“Disfavored children experience worse
outcomes across the board: more depression, greater aggressiveness, lower self-
esteem, and poorer academic performance . . . And it’s not all rosy for the favored
children eithertheir siblings often come to resent them, poisoning those
relationships.”).
2. The term multiple family describes cases in which an obligor has
children from differ ent partners who ha ve existing child sup port orders and none
of those dependents live in the obligor’s household. See LA. REV. STAT. ANN. §
9:315.1(C)(3) (Supp. 2012). Generally, the meaning of multiple family is
different from the me aning of second family. See id. § 9:315(C)(2). Second
family situations typically involve “the legal obligation of a party to support
dependents who are not the subject of the action before the court and who are in
the party’s household.” Id. For purposes of this Comment , however, the term
second family refers to the second family to which an obligor owes child
support.
3. For purposes of this Comment, the parent who has a court order
requiring him or her to pay child support is deemed the obligor or non-
domiciliary parent, while the other parent, who does not have a court order
requiring him or her to pay child support, is deemed the domiciliary parent.
4. This Comment refers to the obligor’s first and preceding families as t he
prior family and the obligor’s second and sequential families as the subsequent
family.
5. See LA. REV. STAT. ANN. § 9:315.1(A) (Supp. 2012) (“The premise of
these guidelines as well as the provisions of the Civil Code is that child support
is a continuous obligation of both parents, children are entitled to share in the
current income of both parents, and children should not be the economic victims
of divorce or out-of-wedlock birth.”).
6. See discussion infra Part I.B.
296 LOUISIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 73
statutory preference is known as a “first-family-first” policy.7 The
Louisiana Legislature’s intent behind using this policy to calculate
multiple family support orders is to deter divorce and ensure that
the first family receives the amount of support it would have
received if the family were still together.8 Yet, despite these goals,
Louisiana’s child support guidelines9 unconstitutionally
discriminate10 against subsequently born children.11 Additionally,
child support awards rendered under the guidelines create feelings
of inferiority in subsequent children12 and do not serve the best
interest of all the obligor’s children.13
The goal of this Comment is to highlight the major problems
with the first-family-first policy14 and to identify potential
alternatives that would better calculate support in multiple family
7. See LAURA W. MORGAN, CHILD SUPPORT GUIDELINES: INTERPRETATION
AND APPLICATIO N § 3.04[b] (Supp. 2004).
8. See Katherine Shaw Spaht, The Two “ICS” of the 2001 Louisiana Child
Support Guidelines: Economics and Politics, 62 LA. L. REV. 709, 732–33 (2002)
(The statutory rhetoric that is now incorporated into the guidelines is “that [1] a
child should not be the victim of divorce and [2] the obligor [cannot] ‘shed’ or,
at a minimum, reduce his responsibility to his first family by incurring
additional obligations to a second family.”).
9. The current Louisiana child support guidelines, which implement the
first-family-first policy, are hereinafter referred to as the “guidelines.” See LA.
REV. STAT. ANN. § 9:315–:315.47 (2008 & Supp. 2012).
10. The guidelines classi fy the obligor’s children based on the family to
which they were born and discriminate against children born in the obligor’s
second family. The determining factor for which family is awarded more child
support money is based on who establishes the child support order first. This has
been described as a “race to the court house.” REVIEW OF LOUISIANA’S CHILD
SUPPORT GUIDELINES: 2000 FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE CHILD
SUPPORT GUIDELINES REVIEW PUR SUANT TO LSA RS 9:315.12 31 (2000)
[hereinafter 2000 FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS]. Children from the fir st
family, however, have a significant leg-up in this race because they have more
time to obtain the child support order than those children from subsequent
families. The guidelines necessarily give a preference to children from the first
family, and for purposes of this Comment, the determining factor for which
family is awarded more support is based on each child’s birth orderi.e., based
on which family the child was born into.
11. See discussion infra Part II.
12. See discussion infra Part III.C.3.
13. See discussion infra Part III.C.1.
14. For an explanation of first family first’s constitutional problems, see
discussion infra Part II. For an explanation of first family first’s policy problems
(which include: the unconstitutionality of first family first, the fact that child
support awards rendered under the guidelines are not in the best interest of all
the obligor’s children, and the fact that child support awards rendered under the
guidelines provoke feelings of inferiority among subsequent children), see
discussion infra Part III.
To continue reading
Request your trial