One of the most confounding dilemmas to face parents are the ongoing and oftentimes boundless struggles, obligations, and duties to provide for adult children with special needs, regardless of whether those obligations and duties are self-imposed, involuntary, moral, ethical, financial, caretaking and otherwise "supportive" in every sense of that word. "Going through a divorce can be one of the most difficult times in a person's life. This difficulty is often greatly increased when the parties have children together. Further challenges arise where one or more of the parties' children have special needs." Navigating the Divorce Process When You Have a Child With Special Needs, The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (2015). While there are a myriad of complex issues that divorce lawyers face on a daily basis in their law practices, few provide the kind of heart wrenching decisions facing their clients than recognizing and dealing with the conundrums of providing for the care and support of developmentally disabled children as those children approach and enter adulthood, if they are not adults already from a chronological perspective at the time of the divorce.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently signed into law legislation that had been sitting on the desk of her predecessor at the time that Governor Hochul assumed office, which amends both the Domestic Relation Law (DRL) and the Family Court Act (FCA) by making the parents of adult children with "certain" developmental disabilities chargeable for the support of those children until the age of 26. See DRL §240-d and FCA §413-b. The legislative memorandum providing the "justification" for this change in our law, reads as follows: