Special Needs Children and Divorce
Divorce is difficult enough for many families, especially for families with special needs children. When going through a divorce, the first instinct as a parent is to protect your children. For parents with a special needs child, issues of future care become even more critical after a divorce.
In this situation, many issues can affect your child’s future and quality of life after a divorce, including how to properly set up special needs trusts, public benefits, Medicaid benefits, and others.
How do you ensure that these benefits can be tailored into a successful care plan for your special needs child after a divorce?
Don't let a divorce jeopardize care for your Special Needs Child
The key to successful implementation of sound care strategies is careful pre-planning. By including an experienced special needs lawyer, divorcing parents with special needs children can make a positive difference in their child’s well-being.
Our firm’s strength in handling special needs issues lies in Christina Lesher’s background as an attorney and a licensed social worker. This background allows her to produce viable care plans and appropriate estate plans for parents with special needs children.
We work closely with your family law attorney to ensure Medicaid eligibility and other valuable public benefits are not jeopardized during the divorce process.
This allows us to successfully create the right plan tailored for your particular case by addressing different needs:
- Discuss what changes need to take place in visitation schedules for the disabled child, parents, grandparents and other family members.
- Work out realistic, healthy and positive plans for visitation tailored to the child’s needs, and within Texas divorce and visitation guidelines.
- Establish and direct child support payments to a self-settled special needs trust for disabled children to prevent losing any SSI and Medicaid benefits.
With a self-settled trust receiving child support payments, it is important that the grantor is a parent or grandparent. Parents can use the trust to maintain or establish Medicaid benefits as part of an overall plan for that special needs person; they can also take advantage of its other uses in the future, such as funding it from intestate testamentary assets and personal injury settlements.
In addition to protection for their special needs child, our firm encourages each parent to do their own estate planning to protect their own needs.
To help ensure a divorce does not compromise the valuable care your special needs child needs to maintain a healthy and happy future, contact the Houston Law Office of Christina Lesher directly at (713) 529-5900.