Nearly 7 million American housenholds include grandparents and grandchildren, and in a third of those households the grandparents are the caretakers for the grandchildren. More than two million U.S. grandparents are bringing up their grandchildren. An estimated 800,000 of these families have completed a formal legal adoption. It’s just an estimate, because grandparents raising their grandchildren don’t always share that information. And they don’t always go through the adoption process. Is that a wise choice? If you’re in this situation, you mya have wondered. “Do I need to adopt? And do I need a lawyer for a grandparent adoption?”
Do grandparents need to adopt?
Grandchildren end up with grandparents as their primary caregivers for lots of reasons.
Traditionally, it was not unusual for a teen mom and her parents to pretend that her child was actually her sibling. The grandmother, in these cases, would just behave as though the new child in the family was another brother or sister. In some cases, the mother and grandmother would take a trip and come back with an infant or the teen mom would go away to school (supposedly) and her mom would come for a visit and bring home an infant. Communities, in those secretive days, would go along with the idea.
More recently, grandparents step in when a son or daughter needs help parenting. Often, substance abuse or incarceration is a factor, but every family is different. Grandparents can be a great help in difficult times, and the biological parents may find it easy to leave kids with their meemaw and papaw.
However, there are drawbacks to raising kids without the security of a legal adoption. Grandparents who are raising their grandchildren don’t have legal rights to make decisions about education, healthcare, and the like. The parents can give them some permissions — for example, to pick kids up at school or to talk with their pediatrician — but they may be in a difficult position if there are any emergencies or even questions about their involvement.
A legal adoption process also helps to ensure inheritance rights, insurance eligibility, and other legal protections. While grandparents caring for their grandchildren are less likely to face legal problems than friends or neighbors, they simply don’t have the legal rights they need to give kids stability.
In the unfortunate cases where the child’s biologoical parents are unpredictable, grandparents who have not adopted the child can’t prevent the parents from taking the child away suddenly. If the arrangement is permanent, it is important for the grandparents to go throgh the legal adoption process.
Do grandparents need a lawyer?
You might have noticed that we used the word “legal” a lot. An adoption is a legal process. Adoption laws are complex and they vary from one state to another. They also change often. It’s easy to make errors in the paperwork and the process, and errors can slopw down the process and create time-consuming, expensive problems. Because of this, you not only need a lawyer for your adoption journey, you need an experienced adoption lawyer.
Heimer Law is a family law firm with a specialization in adoption. We have helped hundreds of families grow through adoption, so we have the answers to your questions and the solutions to your problems. Meet with us for a free consultation.
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