Hi, I’m Matthew Brickman, Florida Supreme court mediator. Welcome to the Mediate This! Podcast where we discuss everything mediation and conflict resolution.

In the news lately, I have seen that the Trump administration is considering a $9,000 child care benefit for married families with a stay-at-home parent. And it is a plan designed to encourage one parent to stay home and raise the children. So, what does this have to do with mediation? And where do I see divorce and mediation being affected by our government’s administration plan that you know may or may not happen, I don’t know, but we’ll see, you know, going into 2027, what this could potentially do. But I think in order to see where this might go, we should probably take a step back and look at what uh has happened and how we may have gotten here. So it used to be, so I was born in 1974, and um it used to be that you know a man would go to work and a mom could stay home and raise the kids, and on that single income, they could buy a home, they could buy a car, they could pay for college, and this was all done on one salary. Well, that’s just not the state of affairs in uh in our current world. Like, you know, every single state is different uh depending on their incomes and cost of living. But like in the state of Florida, I recently read where like it’s like $100,000 is like to live comfortably. Um it’s crazy. You can’t buy a house. Homes these days are you know at least you know multiple six figures, you know, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred thousand dollars. You know, even rent is you know two, three thousand dollars, you know, the average car payment is like I think recently is like eight hundred dollars. Like, you know, could you do that on a single income? Absolutely not, especially when like in the state of Florida, as of I believe September 2026, minimum wage is $15 an hour. Like you cannot be, you know, living, uh breathing, you know, eating on one salary. You know, both parents have to go to work. And even with two parents going to work, well, then what happens? Well, then you end up having the state or government or an agency raising the kids, whether that’s daycare or school, and then eventually they’re just being taught, and all the the only world these kids know is to rely on the government. Um and kids need both their mother and father. We’ve got you know decades of historical evidence showing the effects of a fatherless home and showing what happens when you know there’s a split in the family nucleus. And so I believe that this uh proposal from the Trump administration is to help families return back to the family nucleus of a mother and a father, raising children together, not being in split homes. Now, how this proposed plan would work is it’s only for married couples. So unfortunately, unmarried couples or single parents would not qualify. Um, and so it’s only for married couples. Now, this is interesting. According, and this this is a current statistic, um, as of the date of uh uh of recording this, the National Center for Health Statistics, or the CDC, and the Institute for Family Studies say that 40% of the kids being born are born out of wedlock, and we call this paternity actions. And the number of marriages that end in divorce, it varies state to state. But interestingly enough, nationally, it’s only about 40 to 45 percent. I know a lot of people walk around going, oh, 50% of marriages end in divorce. Um, that was a projected number that actually dates back to the late 70s, early 80s when divorce hit their all-time peak. Um, but it’s been going down largely because the later generations simply are not getting married. I mean, 40% of the kids being born are born out of wedlock. Um, and so, you know, by rough estimate, just doing some math, roughly 70% of the kids in the U.S. will go to bed tonight without one of their biological parents living in the same home. So, under this new rule, it only applies to married couples, and one spouse must work at least 35 hours per week, and the other spouse must stay home to care for the child. Um, and then there’s income limits. So families must meet income requirements, generally earning under 85% of their state’s median income. So it depends on what the median income is for state by state, but they have to earn under that. Um, and so uh the program currently averages, you know, the idea is about $9,000 per child annually. Um and you know, that would be a subsidy amount. Uh, the the funding source, like people are like, well, where’s this money going to come from? Uh the money is said to come from the existing $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund. It’s a Department of Health and Human Services program originally created to help lower-income working parents pay for child care. Um, and so, you know, some of the critics of this say, oh, well, it favors one form of family versus another form of family, it doesn’t help, you know, single parents or unmarried couples, and unfortunately, that you know is a lot of the people having kids in the United States right now. I mean, again, if 40% of the kids are being born out of wedlock, this program would not qualify. But what it would do is it would encourage parents to um to get married and then to have kids. And then if they are getting this type of help from the government and there’s incentives then to um help pay for the child care, well, that also then uh helps moms and dads have one less thing to argue about. I mean, one of the things that I hear as a mediator that people are arguing about all the time that leads to divorce is money. They’re arguing over finances. Well, if this can be in place to help lift some of that financial burden that would cause arguments and disagreements that then leads to divorce, well then, you know, that could help with you know keeping the families together. Now, how does that work for mediation? Well, that doesn’t look too good for mediation because there’s not much to mediate if people are getting along and actually in intact families, um and you know, not filing for divorce, and if there’s not uh all this unwed uh parenting, having children and paternity actions because they’re actually getting married and then they’re staying together and working together as a family unit. Yeah, this could have a major impact on family law and on mediation, but I think it would be for uh for the good. Now, is that actually going to you know happen? Uh I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see what the administration actually does. Um, what’s interesting is in the state of Florida, as of 2023, the current law is 50-50 timesharing. So we we talked about you know, 40% of the kids are being born out of wedlock, and then about nationally, 40 to 45 percent of the uh marriages end in divorce. But for those that do end in divorce, or even the ones uh that have children on parenting plans or being born out of wedlock, interestingly enough, um, Florida as of 2023 is a rebuttable presumption of 50-50 shared parenting, or some states also refer to that as custody. Um there are only six states in the entire country where there is a legal presumption of 50-50 times sharing or custody. Um of the first states to pass a 50-50 timesharing presumption was actually Kentucky. Um Arkansas also has a 50-50 presumption, West Virginia, uh, Missouri, and Mississippi, along with Florida. So there are you know six states where um it is 50-50 timesharing, um, and that’s the rebuttable presumption. That doesn’t mean that it’s always 50-50, that doesn’t mean that every case is 50-50, that just means that, well, there’s a rebuttable presumption that 50-50 is in the best interest of children. And if you want to rebut that presumption, well, uh in Florida, there are 20 factors in the statute that then you can rebut the presumption and see if maybe there’s going to be something different than 50-50. So, as far as you know, what is the Trump administration going to do with this uh child care benefit? Time will tell. We will see uh if in fact it’s just something they’re putting out there due to the midterms uh coming up, or if this is something that’s actually going to become uh the law, and then see, you know, if that changes people’s behavior um based on this benefit. But time will tell.

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For more information about my services or to schedule your mediation with me, either in person or using my iChatMediation Virtual Platform built by Cisco Communications. Visit me online at www.iMediateInc.com. Call me at 561-262-9121, Toll-Free at 877-822-1479 or email me at MBrickman@iChatMediation.com.