I was watching an episode of “Beverly Hills 90210” (yeah, yeah, make fun) where Brandon is dating a high school girl with an infant son. She’s been dealing with it, going to school and raising a child, but then she wants to go to college and considers giving him up. My question is…how late can you do this? Obviously when the kid is seventeen, that’s too late, but realistically, how old does it have to be before it’s too late?
You mean legally or when’s the latest it’s not a horrible thing to do to a kid?
Well, a legal change of custody parent/guardianship can be at any age, although if you’re the adoptee over 18, the courts would look at it funny. I have heard of adults adopting other adults.
Interesting question though. Most adoptions are finalized around 48-72 hours after birth. I found a UK site that said up to three months.
I found a South African site that said once the kid is 10, he or she has to consent to the adoption.
I meant legally, but I suppose the latter question is also good…I know that by the time they’re around six or seven months, they can recognize caretakers and have separation anxiety when separated from the primary caretaker, usually the mother. I suppose by that point, adoption would be pretty horrific. Even older is pretty scary. I remember reading about those places where people can drop off infants if they just can’t deal, and apparently in Japan, a man dropped off his four year old son…that gave me nightmares.
If you go to your local adoption website you can see tons of teenagers who are available for adoption. It’s pretty heartbreaking because you know nobody’s going to adopt all these six foot minority teen boys with behavior issues and such.
Plenty of people do adopt older kids when they marry their mother or father, though. That situation is quite common.
Melissa Elizabeth Stern a/k/a “Baby M” of the surrogate mother custody case, went to court at age 18 to have her biological mother’s parental rights terminated and to be formally adopted by biological father William Stern’s wife Dr. Elizabeth Stern.
Legally, an adoption can occur at any age if a court approves it. If you simply abandon or refuse to take care of your children, the state is going to come in, take the kids, probably attempt to terminate your parental rights and possibly let someone else adopt them. Alternatively, if you get 50 grand in the hole in child support, the custodial parent might offer to let you terminate your rights and let you off the hook for the arrearage so his or her new spouse can adopt the child. This can happen if the child is 15 weeks or 15 years old.
Well, if a woman just stops caring, Social Services will step in and take over because she’s got mental/hormonal issues. If a man stops caring, well he better be really sick.
In one of the more bizarre elements of the Diane Whipple dog mauling, the couple later convicted in the case, Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller, adopted the prison inmate who owned the dogs, Paul ‘Cornfed’ Schneider, three days after the attack. Schneider was 39, Noel and Knoller were 60 and 46, respectively. story
Oh yeah, I remember reading that when it came out. Strange case, that one.
I mean, I was aware of things like that, or stepparents adopting their stepchildren legally…but I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of a mother giving up her child. I had assumed that that usually happened and was arranged before birth. Could you just go to an adoption agency and tell them you wanted to have your seven month old adopted out? Year old? Would they, or the law, look at you askance? I suppose it’s different if it’s done through someone you know…like people whose grandparents or other relatives end up being their legal guardians.
Interesting quirk in Arizona law. You can adopt someone if you are 18 or older. You can be adopted if you are under 21. Thus there could be a situation where you are younger than your child.
Among my older sister’s adopted children are four who are actual siblings. I don’t know at what exact ages their biological mother gave them up, but it was all of them at the same time. In other words, the biological mother didn’t have a baby, put it up for adoption, have another baby, put it up for adoption, etc. She had a family-full of children and put them up for adoption. Just based on the difference between the ages of the oldest and youngest of the four, the oldest had to be at least five years old when they were given up by their mother.
I was in a court room observing one day when a woman was terminating her parental rights to her 15 year old son. She told the court she couldn’t handle him anymore and wanted out. When the hearing was over, the child went to a foster home and the mom (and I use the term loosely) went on her merry way, child-free.
Though my mother terminated her parental rights legally in India when I was age four, the adoption did not officially go through in the States until I was seven or eight. (I had to become a citizen first, and the process takes a long time. I don’t really remember much about it.)
Also, my aunt just adopted an adult son in 2001 - partly to facilitate his entry into the US, partly because they wanted to. I don’t know, do the parents have to terminate their parental rights with an adult son too?
When I was in law school back in the early '90s, adoptions of adults were often reputed to be a means by which gay couples could obtain a measure of legal recognition of their relationship (for purposes of hospital visitation, etc.). I have no clue how common that actually was.