Dear Mrs Macaulay,

I have two children who have not received financial support from their father for over four years now. I did not take him to court during that time. The kids, now 18, are attending university. Can I seek maintenance for the years he did not contribute, as well as for now?

You have been very inattentive about your children’s rights to be maintained by their father. I am assuming from your very sparse letter that you had an order of maintenance from the court, which the father had been paying but failed to continue to pay over the last four years, and you did nothing to ensure that he was made to continue to pay his contribution for their maintenance. You say that he has not supported them, and yet you did not bring this failure to the attention of the Family Court. You did your children a great disservice, since he had been providing for them before, whether by order of the court, or as a result of what he and you agreed he should pay, and you should have taken legal action about his failure to meet his obligations. It is a debt he owes for those years.

Assuming there was an order in place, you can therefore file claims for the sums which he left unpaid for the children, and which are in arrears for those years.

You should then go to court so that you can make your claim for the four years’ money, and the intake clerk will inform you what you must do, and assist you so that the claims for each of the children can be filed.

As to your question about whether you can seek maintenance contributions from him now that the children are 18, under the original Maintenance Act the answer would have been a resounding no, unless an application was made to the court for an existing maintenance order to be extended beyond the child’s 18th birthday, before the date of such birthday, to enable them to continue their education, or until they reached age 23.

However, this year the original Act was amended to change that provision, so that the court can grant a maintenance order after a child reaches 18 years of age, to enable them to pursue a course of education or training, even if a maintenance order did not exist before the child’s 18th birthday. Note that such an order would only last until the child reaches age 23.

The amendment provides that the child, at 18, would be able to make the application herself or himself; or the other parent can; or any other person who has care and custody of the child. So you must also speak to the intake officer of the Family Court in your parish about this.

Please do not let the children down now. You must go to the court and find out from the intake officer what you ought to do, to firstly get the four years’ money still due and owed by the children’s father, and then to ask for their help for your application to be prepared and filed, going forward. Then when that is completed , you must also ask about whether you or the children themselves can file for maintenance from their father for the years of their university studies, until they are 23 years old. The officer will assist you at no cost. It is their statutory duty to do so.

All the best.

Margarette May Macaulay is an attorney-at-law, Supreme Court mediator, notary public, and women’s and children’s rights advocate. Send questions via e-mail to allwoman@jamaicaobserver.com; or write to All Woman, 40-42 1/2 Beechwood Avenue, Kingston 5. All responses are published. Mrs Macaulay cannot provide personal responses.