Eschewing the discretionary court-based approach to child maintenance in Singapore: towards a consistent and predictable legal framework

Divorcing parents generally agree that they should maintain their children. What they often disagree on, however, is the quantification and apportionment of child maintenance. Put simply, how should child maintenance be quantified? After quantifying child maintenance, how should child maintenance be apportioned between the parents? Should the apportionment be numerically equal? Or should the apportionment be numerically different, and if so, how? Although these are deceptively simple questions, they have no easy answers. Unlike jurisdictions such as the UK and Australia, which rely on administrative agencies for the determination of child maintenance, Singapore serves as an interesting case study in that it adopts a discretionary court-based approach to child maintenance against the backdrop of an absence of child maintenance guidelines that could potentially guide the courts in their exercise of discretion. In this regard, this article critiques Singapore’s discretionary court-based approach to child maintenance and advances a consistent and predictable legal framework that the courts can apply when dealing with child maintenance disputes in the interests of promoting certainty and reducing acrimony between divorcing parents.