My girlfriend has a daughter that will be 12 next month. She was married to the biological father at the time of Daughter’s birth, but divorced him immediately after. The birth dad never showed any interest in his child - in fact, he lost interest while Girlfriend was pregnant, once he found out the child would be a girl. There has been no contact with the father, Daughter has never met him, Girlfriend never pursued child support - she just wanted him out of her life. Girlfriend says he basically “signed his rights away,” but I’m not sure what that means. She’s said if the birth dad were to suddenly decide he wanted visitation rights or something, he could go to court and make the attempt to get them, but she has no fear of that ever happening.
Anyway, while we don’t have immediate plans to get married, or have a date set, we most likely will within the next couple of years. When that happens, I’d like to adopt Daughter (if she’s willing, of course).
I’ve done some Googling on the subject, and the impression I’m under is that we would need permission from the birth dad. Even if we could find him (he’s most likely in jail), we wouldn’t want to. We have no interest in opening up that can of worms.
I’m curious if anyone here has ever had a similar situation, if it’s even possible to adopt a spouse’s child while completely leaving the other biological parent out of the picture.
This is not a Need Answer Fast situation, it’s just idle wondering at this point. I also don’t mean for this to sound like I’m asking for legal advice; this is just something I’ve thought about from time to time, and I’m looking for any similar experiences.
First off let me say should you get married it is a lovely idea. It really ties a family together.
My experience is that you will probably need legal assistance at some point, the earlier the better to make sure you don’t screw up. Perhaps start at a gov’t adoption agency and ask for some pointers or brochures that describe the process (or hit the Google for your local info).
At some point you are going to be hiring a family lawyer. I am going to guess that they are going to tell you that you do need to track down the ex, or at least be able to prove you tried. There are exact steps you will have to take.
If that fails then you will likely have to take an advertisement in a paper of record where you live (you’ve seen those legal notices) then after awhile you can proceed.
In the offhand chance you do contact birthdad you might consider a carrot and a stick. The carrot might be “we need this, here is $200.” The stick can be whatever you might dream up. Talk to your lawyer about that.
Either way, good luck in your quest. Nothing legal is cheap I’m afraid, but with matters like this its important to do it right.
I’m not sure how much things have changed in the last 50 years, but my mom divorced her first husband by public notice, because he’d disappeared completely. Various legal notices had to be published in the paper at certain intervals to accomplish this.
When she married my dad a few years later, he adopted both her kids. Again, all done without any actual contact with the ex, since no one knew where he was.
He did show up once, a couple of years later, wanting to see his kids. Dad told him that they’d be glad to make arrangements for that, as soon as he’d paid up all the back child support he owed. That was the last anyone ever heard of him.
So, yes, talk to a family law professional. There is a process for doing these things when you don’t know where a person is.
If you do have to actually deal with him for some reason, I’d agree with the ‘carrot & stick’ approach already suggested. Jail time for 14 years of unpaid child support could be a pretty big stick.
If by some chance your girlfriend means his parental rights were terminated by a court when she says he “signed his rights away” , ignore what follows.
You really have two questions. The first is can you adopt if he can't be found? The answer to that is almost certainly yes. There will be some procedure for him to be notified by publication if he truly cannot be found. The second question is can you adopt without anyone looking for him, and the answer to that is almost certainly no. Someone, whether it's your girlfriend, the court or a social service agency is going to have to look for him most likely at his last known address and possibly in hospitals . prisons and jails.
You don’t necessarily need his permission- his parental rights must be terminated before you adopt, but that can happen either because he agrees to it or because a court decides he has abandoned the child.
I think in most states, you would be considered a parent/guardian for most purposes by default after you get married, so there isn’t any further step you need to take to “adopt” your step-daughter. The birth dad might take precedence in some situations, but not if “signed away his rights” means he had his parental rights formally terminated. If that’s not the case, that might be something good to do right now. It shouldn’t be too hard given the total lack of contact or child support.
The answer is truly state specific, so the only real answer is to consult a lawyer in your state, preferably one who specializes in family law.
But generally speaking, yes, you (or rather, his mother) do need to make an honest to goodness good faith attempt to track him down and get him to sign a piece of paper terminating his paternal rights. If he can’t be found (after some number of attempts or some length of time specified by law) then you can often take out ads in newspapers with a substantial circulation in the last city/town he’s known to have lived. In some states, you can skip this step and can petition the court to sever his rights due to abandonment if he’s been out of the picture with no contact for X number of years or if there is good reason to think that contacting him would not be in the girl’s best interest (say, he’s a known child sex offender, violent felon, etc.) “Don’t want to open that can of worms” isn’t generally a good enough reason to abrogate a person’s rights as a parent, no matter how deadbeat they’ve been.
I will add, though, that there’s emotional value in including your daughter in some way in your wedding ceremony, even if it’s not a legal bond. Giving her a necklace with a promise to be part of her family henceforth, or something like that.
Just…makes sure it’s what *she *wants. 12 year old girls can be, uh, “sensitive”, and if she’s got some sort of Princess In The Tower fantasy about her Daddy coming to rescue her someday, you want to tread very carefully.
I said “even if we could find him…” I shouldn’t have worded it that way. We don’t know where he is at the moment, nor do we care. If we had to find him, though, Girlfriend would be able to track him down via old friends, and his family.
The guy is a registered sex offender, for having sex with a 17 year old when he was 21. Perhaps we could use that to our advantage.
Daughter used to ask about her dad quite often, but that ended not long after I came along. I think Daughter would be into the idea of me adopting her… well, maybe not today, as she got into a heap of trouble…
I think it’s a great idea. One of my close friends while growing up was adopted by her mom’s husband and it was the best thing that could have happened.
If you haven’t already, as a couple you and your lady should try bringing up marriage with your daughter. I don’t know anyone who’s gotten married with kids involved that didn’t get the kids involved in the wedding itself, even if it’s only so much as to make sure, over a period of time, that they’re good with the idea. But that’s what engagements are for, right? Just try to ‘ask’ ahead of time, make her a part of it. It doesn’t sound like she’d have any problem with it, but it’s still nice to be asked.
After that, it’ll be an easier and natural discussion regarding official adoption. And THEN you can deal with all the legal stuff, 'cause yeah, there will be legal stuff. But it’ll be worth it.
This doesn’t help with your question, but the story might interest you. A friend of mine married a divorced woman with a daughter (she was probably about 8 at the time). They lived in the same town as the biological father, but he had remarried and started a new family and had zero interest in this daughter. My friend wanted to adopt her and the biological father was happy to agree with the adoption and has had, AFAIK, no contact with his daughter since. Fast forward a decade and my friend and his wife split up. But he still had a daughter and provided whatever was needed, including splitting her college costs with his ex. Fast forward a few decades and he was old, sick, with only a small retirement benefit (he had a checkered career as a mathematician and didn’t have any job at all for the last 25 years of his life). But the person who cared for him when was ill and eventually in a nursing home until he died was his daughter.
This. She’s old enough to consider whether she wants to be adopted forever or if she wants an Uncle GESancMan who will love and protect her until her daddy comes home. There’s nothing wrong with being that Uncle GESancMan. Forcing adoption on her, even if you are legally entitled to do it without her consent, could damage your relationship now or in the future. In a few years, do you want a sweet and loving teen girl or a cynical teen who is angry because her family and identity were stolen from her?
Also, whose last name does she currently have? That could also be something to discuss with her and your girlfriend - e.g. if she wants to take your name along with her mom, or what she wants. She’s old enough, I think, to make her own choice. Remember - if she doesn’t like the name forced upon her you may end up with an unmanageable daughter who will be at the courthouse on her 18th birthday to ask a judge to give her the name she always wanted, and there will be little you can do about it.
Which is the type of sex offender that, arguably, isn’t really that dangerous. Yeah, he made the wrong choice, but how old is he now- 30’s? Is there any indication that he would want to have sex with much younger girls? If not, I might imagine that he’s safer than some random guy you met on the street because the dad has gone through the trauma of being arrested and all that and may think twice before doing something to get them arrested again as opposed to a carefree guy with no arrest record who thinks, “It can’t happen to me.”.
One of my former co-workers had a similar experience to this. Her parents were married, but the biodad checked out of the marriage before she was born, the divorce was finalized shortly thereafter and there was no visitation or child support. But she was stuck with his last name, and didn’t like it very much.
Her mother remarried when she was 10 or 12, and they did not have lots of money to try to track down birthdad, get a lawyer to draw up papers renouncing his rights, papers renouncing HER rights to the child support he never paid, etc. etc. Also, I believe there was something mentioned about birthdad POSSIBLY being heir to some big money way down the road, and they didn’t want to accidentally lose her claim to that potential windfall later in life, which doing a formal adoption would very well might have done.
So, what they did was pretty simple - she went to the courthouse with her parents at age 12 or whatever, and had a legal name change done, to match her new stepdad. Not a proper adoption (although that was what they WA*NTED, they weren’t sure if it was the best thing, and it was too expensive for their limited means at the time.) but just a legal name change. It wasn’t expensive, maybe $100 or so all said and done.
Once the name change was official, she started calling Stepdad “Dad” and amongst their family, at least, the name change WAS the de facto adoption. Even though they all knew, technically speaking, it was not the same, exactly.
It wound up working out for her. Do you think you guys could get away doing something slightly informal like that?
For that matter, in most states simply using a new name is sufficient to legally change it, no paperwork or court appearances required. It’s possible to walk into the school and/or doctor’s office and say, “Jane’s last name is Smith now, what do I need to fill out to update her records?” Those are about the only places my kids are on file.
And I believe, and this is based on personal experience, that one of the most important things about helping to raise a child is the actual de facto bond you had and what you did with the child. It doesn’t matter if you’re her dad, uncle, big brother, third cousin twice removed, or fourth cousin’s freshman roommate’s first girlfriend’s probation officer’s elementary school BFF’s drill sergeant. You had a relationship with her, emotionally bonded with her, and helped her become who she grew up to be. Yes, your “legal” relationship does have some relevance, but just because you never managed to get a family court to arrange things perfectly doesn’t ruin everything.
So what do you do when the kid get’s their driver’s license or a passport, or a social security card. Most require a registered birth certificate, and an approved legal document to support the name change. I doubt that when you send in that passport application, a note from the kid’s doctor that his name’s been changed will suffice.
I have no intention of forcing anything upon Daughter. That’s why I said “if she’s willing” in the OP. If I ask her if she wants me to adopt her, and she says no, that will be the end of it.
Daughter has her mother’s maiden name, which Girlfriend changed back to after the divorce. Girlfriend knew she’d be divorcing the guy long before her child was born. They split up after she became pregnant, but she had it in her head that she wanted to be legally married at the time of Daughter’s birth. She literally filed the divorce papers right after Daughter was born. So anyway, she had her maiden name put on Daughter’s birth certificate.
Girlfriend doesn’t want to change her name again when we get married. If daughter decided she wants my name, then that’s fine, but if not, that’s fine too.
I believe he’s in his mid-40s. My girlfriend hates the guy, but even she thinks it’s stupid that he should be considered a sex offender.
I suppose if we’re looking for dirt on the guy to present to the court, the various stints in prison for drug-related stuff would do just as nicely, anyway.
Actually, it will, in a roundabout way. A birth certificate (in my state, anyhow) is not proof of name, but only of birthdate. A school record or medical record *is *proof of name to get a driver’s license or state ID, and a driver’s license or state ID is sufficient to establish identity for a passport.
Think on it: most married women in the US don’t have the same name as their birth certificate. And while I have a copy of my marriage license, absolutely no one ever has asked to see it (including the passport office) - and it has my maiden name on it anyhow. I have absolutely nothing with both my maiden and married names on it.
