Often, when a woman is seeking child support payments from the father of her child, she will seek the services of a family law attorney in St. Augustine in order to establish paternity and then pursue the child support to which she is due. Because fathers do not always step up to the plate when it comes to assuming parental and financial responsibility for their children, public perception often tends to favor moms who are trying to get “deadbeat dads” to pay their fair share of the expenses involved in raising a child. However, there are also plenty of instances in which the man that the woman insists is the father is not the father, after all. If you are being hounded for child support payments or being asked to undergo a paternity test and you are not the father of the child, you can benefit from the services of a family law attorney in St. Augustine.
Your family law attorney can protect your rights if you are being asked to pay child support when you are not the father of the child, regardless of any previous relationship you may have had with the child’s mother. In many instances, the alleged father will hire an attorney to provide assistance with paternity testing to disprove, rather than to prove, paternity. Even though the mother may try to paint a picture of you as a father who is shirking financial accountability, your family law attorney can help to establish that you are not bound to pay child support and will request the tests necessary to prove once and for all that you are not the father.
On the other hand, there are also cases in which a father who wishes to obtain custody of or visitation with a child will retain a family law attorney to establish paternity in order to prove the legal standing to pursue such action. Again, although the presupposition is that only mothers hire attorneys to petition for a paternity test, many fathers know, too, that it is in their best interests to establish their own paternity.
If you need to establish that you are the father of your child, or if you need to confirm that you are not legally responsible for a child, contact a family law attorney in St. Augustine as soon as possible. Do not assume that because you are the male in the situation that you do not have any rights or that the courts will always defer to the child’s mother.
