Making the Impossible, Possible
Video Transcribed: How do I adopt my stepchild? Hello, I’m Ty Smith, an OKC lawyer with Wirth Law. This is an important one. The courts really love to see kids get adopted. While there, of course, there are paperwork requirements that you would hire an attorney for, I tell people there are really three big requirements to adopting a stepchild. First and foremost, this has to be the birth parents, not ideas, but they have to be involved in the whole process.
They have to be the ones advocating and wanting this. Meaning they have to be involved. It can’t be mostly the stepparent. The stepparent and the birth parent have to have been married for at least a year, minimum. The big one is, the other parent has to be willing to give up their parental rights. This is often time the sticking point. Because even if they’re not super duper involved, there’s a sentimental connection with the children, with a child, I should say, that more often than not, parents don’t want to give up.
Even if it means they don’t have to pay child support anymore. I’ve seen parents owing tons of money in child support, but they still don’t want to give up the right to be called dad by a kid. Even if it means like, hey, you don’t have to pay child support anymore if you give this up. Complicated. Anyway, we can get over this if the other parent doesn’t want to give up their parental rights, there is a legal action that you can take to strip the parent of their parental rights.
Essentially you have to show that the other parent has abandoned or has given up all legal, or what I would say, cultural obligations to a child. Being there for the kid, wanting to contact the kid, wanting to talk to them for at least 12 to 14 months. Then it can be stripped of them. But judges are very slow to do this and very cautious to do this because this is a big deal. It’s a huge deal, actually. As I said earlier, there are some other paperwork requirements that you should hire an attorney to do.
Because they are very complicated and time-consuming and tedious, and any one step can set you back months. Best not to do that. Best to just hire a professional to do that. Would love to be that professional for you. As I said earlier, my name’s Ty Smith, an adoption attorney in Oklahoma with Wirth Law, and you can find me on the internet at theoklahomacityattorney.com, or you could call my office at (405) 888-5400. Would love to speak to you about stepparent adoption or really any other legal matter.
