Support and Parenting Time
ORC 3109.051 — two orders, and neither one buys the other
The most common belief about these two orders is that they are connected, and it is wrong in both directions. They are separate orders, decided separately, enforced separately, and one of them is not payment for the other.
Who handles this in Ohio: legal aid programs, lawyer referral and the state offices, listed in the Ohio directory.
The court is expressly forbidden from letting support be held back over visitation. The section says a court shall not authorize or permit the escrowing, impoundment or withholding of any child support payment because of a denial of or interference with parenting time, and shall not permit it as a method of enforcing the parenting time provisions either. That is not a judge's preference. It is the statute removing the option before anybody asks for it.
And unpaid support does not suspend the other parent's time. The same separation runs the other way. A parent owed money who responds by stopping the visits is not enforcing the support order, they are breaching the parenting time one, and a court can hold them in contempt of it. Both orders exist, both are enforceable, and a breach of one does not excuse a breach of the other.
The reason the statute is that blunt is that the arrangement it forbids has an obvious logic to the adults and none at all to the child, who is the person both orders exist for.
Changing the amount has a number attached to it. A support order is modified on a substantial change of circumstances, and the section supplies a definition rather than leaving it to argument. Where a recalculated amount is more than ten percent greater, or more than ten percent less, than the existing order, that deviation is to be considered by the court as a change substantial enough to require a modification. Ten percent either way, on the recalculated figure rather than on a feeling about it.
An order does not adjust itself when income drops. A job lost in March keeps producing the old obligation until something is filed, and the arrears built in between do not disappear when the order is finally changed.
“What would the recalculated figure be, and is it more than ten percent from this one.”
How a support figure is calculated, the health insurance and childcare components, deviations a court may make, and administrative review through a child support enforcement agency each run under their own sections and are not on this page. Establishing or changing parenting time is a separate matter again. What a recalculation would produce, whether a change is substantial, and how arrears are treated are questions for a licensed Ohio attorney, and every county has a child support enforcement agency that handles administrative reviews at no charge.
Sources for this section (2)
- ORC 3109.051 — Parenting time, and the bar on withholding support over it
- ORC 3119.79 — Modifying a child support order, and the ten percent that counts as a substantial change
Legal information, not legal advice. Verified as of September 2026. Applying it to a particular situation is the work of a licensed Ohio attorney.