Child Support Without Filing for Divorce

Indiana law provides the means for obtaining child support without filing for divorce. The law is found at IC 31-16-2. Not a particularly well known statute or one often used.

Why does this statute exist? That question has a straightforward answer: to provide child support for children born of a marriage who has a parent not contributing to their support. More specifically, I used the statute where a father had left mother with the children and she did not want to divorce the man.

Unlike the dissolution of marriage statute (see my earlier article on Indiana's residency requirements for family law cases here), this statute has no requirement for how long one must reside in Indiana but only that at time of filing that one of the parents live in an Indiana county.