Good news! Effective advocacy yields results.

National Parents Organization has been increasingly engaging in the hard work of reforming child support laws and policies to create more fairness in the program, to remove barriers to shared parenting, and ensure that both parents have the financial resources necessary to raise their children.

In 2022, NPO published a groundbreaking study of every state’s child support “parenting time adjustment”— the way the state’s guidelines adjust child support payments to reflect the time the children are in the care of each of their parents. We found that many states are doing a very poor job in this area. Some had no parenting time adjustment (PTA), meaning that the guidelines resulted in the same presumptive child support payments for parents who never see their children as for those who care for their children half the time. Others had ridiculously high thresholds for a PTA to kick in or created “cliff effects”, making a single overnight change result in a huge difference in child support obligations.

Since that time, NPO child support experts Brian Ulrich (NPO’s Senior Child Support Researcher) and George Piskor (NPO Board member) have worked with individual state guideline councils, with state and federal legislators, and with officials in the federal administration to bring about much needed reforms in the child support program.

Colorado Success

When reviewing its child support guidelines, Colorado Child Support Commission invited NPO to present its perspectives on parenting time adjustments. Colorado had a threshold of 25% parenting time before the paying parent received any credit for direct expenses on children and, at that point, there was a huge “cliff effect”: one additional overnight with the children resulted in a 40% change in presumptive child support. High thresholds and cliff effects are economically unwarranted and create parental conflict.

George and Brian presented a detailed analysis of the existing Colorado guidelines and encouraged them to adopt guidelines that avoided these mistakes—guidelines that accurately reflected the direct child-related expenses in both of the children’s homes and avoided conflict-inducing cliff effects.

And it worked!

When the Commission published its report in 2023, it recommended a smooth parenting time adjustment, modeled on the one used in Oregon that was one of the models recommended by George and Brian. And the Commission’s report explicitly acknowledged the assistance that NPO had provided.

The legislative process can be frustratingly slow. It took until March of this year for the Commission’s recommendations to be enacted into law. But now, as a result of NPO’s effective advocacy, Colorado parents going through divorce or separation will find themselves operating under much fairer and shared-parenting-friendly child support guidelines. Colorado’s grade in NPO’s Child Support and Shared Parenting Report Card, which grades states on their parenting time adjustments, will improve from its current grade of ‘B’.

Conclusion

This is real progress. There’s much work to be done in Colorado. In the 2025 NPO Shared Parenting Report Card, which grades states on their child custody laws, the Centennial State received a ‘C’. The state has no statutory preference for or presumption of shared parenting. NPO is not resting in its efforts to create presumptions of equal shared parenting in Colorado (and every state in the country!). But we celebrate this success and thank George and Brian for their excellent work.