After the order: enforcement, modification and the long tail of divorce
Almost everything written about divorce stops at the decree. But the decree is not the end of anything — it is a set of promises that has to survive the next fifteen years of job changes, new partners, teenagers, illness and moving house. This section is about what happens when the order stops working.
If they are not payingTwo separate machines
An administrative one that garnishes wages and seizes tax refunds without a judge,
and a judicial one where you ask for contempt. They run on different tracks and you can use both.
If your income has changedFile the same week
Federal law makes child support arrears a judgment the moment they fall due. A judge
cannot forgive them later, however good your reason. The date you file is the earliest date any
change can reach.
If they are keeping the childrenSupport keeps running
In almost every state the money and the children are legally independent. You may not
stop paying because you are not seeing them, and they may not withhold them because you have not
paid.
When the money stops
- Filing for contempt — how it works, why the court has to find you could have paid, and what the Supreme Court said about being jailed without a lawyer
- Arrears, licenses and passports — the Bradley Amendment, the 2,500 dollar passport threshold, and why the debt cannot be wiped
- Enforcing alimony — a harder road than child support, because the state agency usually will not help you
- The collection machinery — wage withholding, tax intercept and what the state does automatically
When the order no longer fits
- Changing the support number — up or down, the three-year federal review, and the imputed-income trap
- Changing custody — the higher bar, and what a contested custody case actually costs and involves
- Moving with the children
When the judgment itself was wrong
Different from all of the above, and on a much shorter clock. Modification changes an order going forward because life changed. These two attack the judgment itself.
- Reopening a divorce that is already final — fraud, perjury, concealment and duress, the six grounds, and the one-year clock that in some states runs from the day you discovered it rather than the day of the divorce
- Appealing a divorce judgment — the deadline is thirty days in most states and sixty in California, an appeal is not a retrial, and the standard of review decides the case before the briefs are written
- When a divorce goes to trial — how the judgment you are attacking got made in the first place
When it is not about money at all
- When a parent withholds the children
- The Disneyland parent, the badmouthing, the messages sent through the child — what the research says each of these does
- Parental alienation — a genuinely contested subject, set out with both sides visible
- Alienation of affection — a different thing entirely: suing the third party. Now down to three states, and two of them left this year
Sources last checked30 August 2026
Page published30 August 2026
What this means. This is when the sources on this page were last read against their originals — statutes, court rules, official schedules — taken from the date this page was built from its sources. It is not the date the page was last edited. Adding a link or fixing a typo does not move it; re-reading the statute does. Law changes without notice, so treat anything time-sensitive as needing a fresh check. Where we get something wrong we publish it at thecusp.app/corrections with the date, what changed, and how long the error was live.