Here is something for you to answer..

OK here is the story..

My brother married a girl with kids from another marriage. The kids have been staying with her and she has been getting child support from her ex. Ok, so the ex has been enticing the youngest kid ( with promises of Playstation 3 that will only stay at his place and so forth ) to come live with him. If he does go to live with him, he wants the child support payments changed so that he does not have to pay as much to her for child support since one of them is staying with him now. The thing is, the kid will probably not want to stay there for too long. They have done this before and the kid likes to play with his older brother so much that he moved back to his mom's before, and she knows he will do it again. The attorney fee for each party to get the child support changed is around $600. She does not want to have to pay this a week or two after the kid moves, when he decides to move back, to get it changed back over to her.

The ex insists that if the kid is there he get the payments changed right then. He probably is not going to pay for it himself as he didn't last time. He is basically just trying to lure the kid over so he can have some extra cash if only for a little while.

Is there any way she can keep this from happening?

She needs to present it to him this way: If you want the custody order changed (since neither party has the right to arbitrarily change it without a judges approval) then HE has to go to court ( petition the court for the change) meaning HE pays for it. In other words, she needs to explain to little Junior that as much as he would like to go live with daddy, daddy and mommy BOTH will get in a lot of trouble for doing so without a judge saying it is ok. So, if Junior wants to go live with daddy, he has to have DADDY ask the court to make the change.

Bottom line: the party wanting the change needs to be the party that PAYS for that change ( assuming, of course, that a judge would even say yes to such a request, especially when, according to you, the child has done this before.