Unlike mothers, fathers do not always have parental responsibility for their children. With more than one in three children now born outside marriage, some parents may be unclear about who has legal parental responsibility for their children.
Parental responsibility iincludes these key roles:
If the parents of a child are married to each other or if they have jointly adopted a child, then they both have parental responsibility. This is not automatically the case for unmarried parents.
According to law, a mother always has parental responsibility for her child. A father, however, has this responsiblity only if he is married to the mother or has acquired legal responsibility for his child through one of these three routes:
Living with the mother, even for a long time, does not give a father parental responsiblity. If the parents are not married, parental responsiblity does not always pass to the natural father if the mother dies.
All parents including adoptive parents have a legal duty to financially support their child, whether they have parental responsibility or not.
A father can apply to the court to gain parental responsibility. The court will take these factors into account:
The court will then decide to accept or reject the application based on what it believes is in the child's best interest.
Parents
