Guiding Families Through Adoption
In today’s world, many children find themselves in a situation where they have parents who cannot or will not care for them. More and more family law lawyers are seeing situations where children are being raised by extended family members. Whether it is a stepparent who has stepped into the shoes of a biological parent and is raising a child as part of a couple with a biological mother or father; or grandparents who have become more than grandparents and have become a child’s actual parent; or an aunt and uncle or a cousin; who, in effect have become the parents of a child and who are in fact mommy and daddy.
These psychological parents can through the Child and Family Services Act of Ontario become, in reality the child’s parents through a process called family adoption. That is the name coined for adoption, not by a stranger to the child who has grown to love the child, but by loving extended family who seek to legalize the reality of a loving relationship of parent and child through family adoption.
This process, completed with the assistance of a family law lawyer, either with the consent of the biological parent, or parents of the child, or in the face of their opposition, recognizes a real and loving connection, the reality of a parental relationship between a stepparent, aunt or uncle, grandparent(s), cousin or other family member and the child or children they are raising.
Adoption by a family member is no longer rare or considered unusual in the courts, and the lifetime relationships which this process recognizes and legalizes are of infinite importance to the child and their adoptive parent or parents.