The process of adopting a child is understandably a complex one, involving many checks, legal processes and important steps to ensure that the individual or couple choosing to adopt are wholly suitable. Much of the process requires legal assistance, from the moment you send off your application to the all-important stages of completion and custodial rights being handed over. Within this detailed guide, let your local legal professionals at DJP Solicitors take you through all you need to know if you plan on adopting a child in 2024.
What Is Adoption?
A formal legal process in which all the rights and responsibilities relating to a child are transferred to adoptive parents, adoption isn’t a process to be taken for granted. With many various steps and caveats to it, adoption ensures that parental responsibility for a child can be transferred from a birth parent to another adult (aged over 21).
Acting as a way of providing a child or children who cannot be raised by their own parents with a new family, if and when an adoption order is granted by a court, it makes an adopter the legal parent to a child, with strict checks carried out and multiple steps beforehand.
Who Can Adopt A Child?
Not everyone can adopt a child, and if you’re considering adopting, you should be 100% sure your circumstances are compatible with providing for a child. You may be able to adopt a child if you’re aged 21 or over and either single, married, in a civil partnership, in an unmarried couple or the partner of the child’s birth parent.
If you or a member or your household has a criminal conviction or caution for offences against children or for serious sexual offences you will not be able to adopt. Other criminal offences will not automatically exclude you but will be taken into consideration, so always contact a solicitor directly to avoid complications.
How Does The Process Work?
The adoption process is far from simple - understandable considering legal parentage, parental rights and parental responsibilities are being transferred. Where you are granted an adoption order by the court in respect of a child, you will become the child’s legal parent. Following the granting of an adoption order by the court, the child’s biological parent or parents will no longer have any rights or responsibilities in relation to the child.
On average it takes six months to become an approved adoptive parent, and this begins with a Petition for adoption being lodged at Court. As there are so many steps to adopting, we very much advise consulting a solicitor for a detailed outline.
Interested in child adoption? We provide our clients with a specially designated solicitor, who will work towards resolving problems, clarifying matters and making any legal circumstances clear. We appreciate both the expectations of modern consumers and the need to deliver a high quality, traditional solicitor-client relationship, so contact today for an unrivalled service.
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