In the terrain of divorce, the most vulnerable beings needing careful protection are children. They are not a party to the breakdown — the breakdown happened to them. What they need most is protection from unnecessary change: staying in the same home if possible, remaining around familiar people, continuing at the same school. These are examples, not the whole picture.
Despite even the best intentions of both parents, separation inevitably means children can no longer be with both parents in the same place at the same time, except on occasions the parents agree to. The household that once held everyone together now exists in two places. Parents may build a schedule of equal parenting time, but at any given moment, a child is still only with one parent.
Where equal parenting time exists, support disputes are rarer
When parents share parenting time close to equally, child support issues tend to arise less often, since both households are contributing directly to the children’s day-to-day care. But when children live primarily with one parent, the Federal Child Support Guidelines require the other parent — the one with less time with the children — to pay child support. This isn’t optional or discretionary; it’s a calculation based on income, following a legally prescribed formula.
Most parents meet this obligation. Some, for various reasons, don’t. And this is where a very human, very understandable feeling often surfaces in the parent who is meeting their obligations: a sense of betrayal, of carrying a burden unfairly alone. It can start to feel logical that a parent who isn’t paying support hasn’t “earned” the right to see their children — that if they won’t provide materially, they shouldn’t get the emotional reward of parenting time.
The law draws a firm line here
BC and Canadian family law are unambiguous on this point: child support and parenting time are legally separate matters. One cannot be used as leverage against the other. A parent cannot withhold parenting time because support hasn’t been paid, and a parent cannot withhold support because they’ve been denied parenting time. If support is in arrears, the remedy is enforcement — through BC’s Family Maintenance Enforcement Program — not self-help through the parenting schedule. Likewise, if parenting time is being denied, the Divorce Act provides its own separate remedies to address that directly, rather than allowing a parent to simply stop paying in response.
Why does the law separate these so firmly? Because they serve entirely different needs. Support exists to provide material resources for a child’s upbringing — housing, food, clothing, activities. Parenting time exists to nurture something else entirely: a child’s emotional and psychological bond with each parent, the stability of feeling loved and known by both people who created them. One is material. The other is relational. Neither substitutes for the other, and neither should be held hostage to enforce the other.
On the surface, tying the two together can feel almost fair — if a parent isn’t contributing financially, why should they still get the emotional reward of time with the children? But children do not experience love and support as interchangeable currencies. A child who is denied time with a parent because of an unpaid support obligation doesn’t receive more material care as a result — they simply lose something they needed, on top of everything else already lost in the separation.
Seeing the whole picture
This is genuinely one of the harder truths of family law to sit with as the parent who is meeting every obligation while the other isn’t. The feeling of unfairness is completely understandable, and the law doesn’t ask a parent to pretend they don’t feel it. What it does ask is that parents separate their own justified frustration from what the child actually needs — because children still love seeing their parents, and that time fills something no amount of financial support can replace.
The law’s insistence on keeping these matters separate isn’t a failure to see the injustice of a parent shirking their duty. It’s a recognition that punishing the child’s relationship with that parent doesn’t fix the injustice — it only adds another loss for the person who had no say in any of it.
This article is intended for general information purposes and does not constitute legal advice. If you’re navigating a support or parenting time dispute, we’re here to help you understand your options.