Extracurricular activities and who would pay for them?
Expenses for baseball, or softball, or dancing, or swimming class, etc.
Typically, if the court order for Child Custody is Joint Legal Custody, then generally speaking, you cannot start a child in an extracurricular activity without the permission of the other parent. Now, this overlaps for custody. The reason for that is because typically if you’ve got a child that you are starting in, let’s say, a softball team, there’s practice sometimes every night during the week, and certainly games on the weekend. Well, if the other parent has weekend time then you’re going to affect that person’s custodial time. If so, the other parent should have a right to decide whether they want to put their child in this softball team, or swimming, or whatever it might be. That is the custodial issue.
If one parent does this on their own, then they can sometimes get their hands slapped by the judge, and the child can be removed from that sport or that extracurricular activity because the parent that signed them up did not get the okay from the other parent first. On the child support side of that, the cost of softball can be expensive. It might be many hundreds of dollars. There might be a uniform that has to be paid for, jackets, gears, those kinds of things could be many, many hundreds of dollars. For example, cheerleading can be horribly expensive. There’s travel involved if your child is involved in a cheerleading team and they go to championships. The championship competition in cheerleading is in Vegas, and the absolute top championship of cheerleading competition is in Florida after the semifinals in Vegas. So traveling can be very, very expensive and the uniforms are very expensive. It could be a thousand dollars, it could be $1,500, 2000, $3,000.
Who’s gonna pay for that? And is it considered child support?
The answer is no, it’s not child support. But a judge typically will handle the cost of extracurricular activities the same as they handle child support, where they divide it between the parents. Again, this is after both parents agreed to sign the child up. If they both agree to this, then they’re both gonna be on the hook, typically 50/50 for the amount of costs involved.
