Understanding Termination of Parental Rights
What do you do when you want to terminate someone’s parental rights? My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m an attorney with Wirth Law Office. I’ve been practicing for about seven years, mainly doing family law and criminal law. I want to try to help you make law easy by just going through a little bit about the elements of when and how you can terminate parental rights.
It’s not as easy as a lot of people think. I get this question at least once every couple of months. I got it a lot whenever I was first starting my practice. For whatever reason, a custodial parent thinks the non-custodial parent isn’t fulfilling their duties to their children and they want to terminate their rights. Or a non-custodial parent just thinks I don’t want to be a parent. It’s too much of a hassle. I don’t want to deal with my crazy ex, whatever the case may be.
Legal Requirements for Termination of Parental Rights
Sometimes I’ve seen non-custodial parents just want to wash their hands of it and go away. You can’t do that. You can, but it won’t work well. I mean, yeah, any non-custodial parent can just walk away from a child, not pursue visitation, not pursue any type of relationship, but that won’t relieve them of their obligations for child support.
If you want to terminate the rights of a parent, you have to have another parent willing to step in and accept those rights. You have to have someone that you can hand that baton off to and they run off with it and keep on going. Most often I see these in step-parent adoptions, you know, step-dad or step-mom is just like, hey, so I know I’m the bonus parent, but I want to be the primary parent. They’re not doing their job.
Grounds for Termination Without Consent
There’s a specific statute that lists several grounds where the rights of a parent can be terminated without that parent’s consent. The two most common are if the parent has failed to establish or maintain a relationship with the child, meaning they haven’t exercised visitation, or if the parent has failed to support the child, either under a child support order or following their financial means if there’s no child support order in place.
On either of those grounds, the relationship or the child support aspect of it, you have to show that they failed to do that consistently for 12 out of 14 months before filing the petition. If you’re in a situation where you think that this is something for you or you need some more information about it, please feel free to let us know. My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m with Wirth Law Office and I want to help you to make law easy. Thank you.
Call to Action: Schedule a Strategy Session
If you are considering terminating parental rights or need more information about the process, contact us at 918-879-1681 to schedule a low-cost initial strategy session. Let us help you navigate the legal complexities and make informed decisions for your family.
