The father is claiming that he’s not paying because he wants to have custody of the child exactly half the time. What this means is his parents would have custody half the time, since he usually just foists his kid off on them anyway when he’s got her. However, considering that my friend is working full time, lives on her own dad has a roommate and thus there would be no room for his kid when she visited, and the child is healthy, happy, well-fed, well-clothed, sheltered and generally in very good shape, it is sooooo unlikely that he would be awarded any kind of custody, aside from visitation rights. He’s the kind of non-custodial parent who would get angry because she was using the child support for things like putting gas in her car or paying bills in addition to actually buying food, clothing and diapers specifically for the child. It’s like he doesn’t understand that the meager $300 a month that he was paying before doesn’t pay for everything his daughter needs, so mom puts gas in her car to drive to her job to pay for everything else for their daughter and she pays the bills so that their kid has a place to live and can be warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
This whole thing just sucks beyond all reason. This man also doesn’t understand some basic things about children. Once, when the child was younger and she was just learning how to walk, she fell down the stairs. She had a little cut on her forehead, and nothing else was wrong. And she never hurt herself like that again. He got so enraged that his ex would allow that and I had to explain to him that kids sometimes hurt themselves. That is the nature of being a child. If that’s grounds for taking a kid away, I wouldn’t know my grandparents since @JilltheTooth‘s favorite thing to do when she was younger was bleed spectacularly from her face. Seriously, this woman always fell on her face as a child and would fountain blood. My grandparents got so jaded about it after a while. :P
This whole situation is just shitty. It’s not just that dad is refusing to pay child support, but it also means that the relationship he has with his daughter and her mother is getting worse and worse which will harm this little girl more in the long run.