Having mentioned “Father’s Rights Activism” here before, and seeing more and more pages pop up where men (and various allies of theirs) congregate together claiming to want as close to a 50/50 time share of their children — which I’m not even going to dissect other than to say that a lot of the men that I see affiliating with these pages for this reason want that time share to try and “get out” of having to pay, or owe, child support to their exes, and many of them make it extremely obvious in their words and their actions — I’ve begun to see one thing stick out like a sore thumb: “if she’s getting my child support, I want receipts”. “I want to know exactly how she’s spending my money”. Calling it “leech support”, as though their children must be the leeches that benefit, supposing they consistently pay. Calling it “extortion money”. Practically screaming that she must be spending it on her hair, her nails, her new boyfriend, her other children, sometimes getting hostile in how they word this. (Some of these pages I don’t interact with for this reason.)

There’s a word for this, and something that is being studied more frequently now: financial abuse.

If they can no longer control their exes through their relationships with her, they’ll control her through financial support of their children if they can’t avoid their obligation to pay. In certain circumstances, I honestly think that child support should not even be drawn up, and I think that this should go beyond the non-custodial parent being disabled and having that “on record” — that, barring incarceration for the entire length of time that the child will spend a minor, is currently the only circumstance wherein child support is either not drawn up or is “recorded” as owed at $0 (depending on where you live and how this is handled). Some lawyers will say, “Oh, but the judge won’t sign off on a custody order or divorce decree if something isn’t ordered! You can just elect not to ever have the child support case worked!” Some of the people that participate on these sorts of pages write in with “success stories” of how they “got 50/50 and no child support ordered”, but assuming that these stories are even true, this apparently involves a lot of judge shopping and basically forcing the judge’s hand with no one being on any sort of public assistance… or it being made clear that if this isn’t ordered, the non-custodial parent (usually a him in this circumstance, it’s almost always a him in this circumstance) is going to fight the system as hard as he can and little to nothing is going to get paid anyway, the custodial parent for whatever reason is fine with this, so why bother fighting it by refusing to sign the “agreed upon” order. But it stands: asking for receipts is financial abuse.

These men trust these women with their children, or else CPS/DHS would have been called, or they would have fought harder in court to obtain primary custody of their children. It wouldn’t have been impossible.

They just need to admit that if they want receipts so badly they are financial abusers and leave it at that.