Child Custody and Parental Rights: The Legal Terms

Child custody – a term most children do not want in their lives due to the instability it might cause in their life routine. But in the case of the parents separating or divorcing for legal reasons, the law needs to have a provision for determining who gets to bring up the child. Gone are the days when the child’s gender and parents’ stereotyped roles would determine child custody. With multiple parental figures arising out of divorces and remarriages, it has become essential to legalise child custody based on a variety of factors including the ability of the parent to provide for the child and the financial and emotional stability.

Legally, child custody refers to the legal relationship between the parent and the child, and the rights a person has to make decisions on the child’s behalf until the child is a major on legal terms. The legal rules of child custody dictates that the judge who conducts the proceedings would decide on the child custody based on the best interests of the child, and in many cases, consider all the various factors involved before arriving at a decision, so much so that no two cases are similar, each of them having unique factors that decide the outcome and the child custody.

Parental Rights vs Child Custody

While the concept of child custody determines a child’s legal guardian, understanding that every parent has rights and responsibilities when it comes to their children is also important. This is the proverbial other side of the coin, and it is essential to make sure that these rights are not neglected or violated. Understanding one’s own parental rights is important in the legal stand point.

There have been instances in the legal history of parents voluntarily giving up their rights for the better interests of the child, or in some extreme cases, the rights being voluntarily terminated with valid reasons.

Both the types of terminations of parental rights have to be recorded legally so that there are not digressions or emotional upheavals at a later point in life for the child with the parents getting involved without having the rights too. Voluntary termination is usually done with those parents giving up their rights, but even there, recording them legally is important to avoid future complication.

As advocates from Garfield Logan Law would advise, the involuntary termination of parental rights by the intervention of court is even more important to uphold and never rescind. The legal termination of parental rights leaves no space for any legal parent child relationship after that point. The child can then be handed over to the parent who has legal parental rights, or to a guardian in case both the parents have issues that cannot be cleared.

In extreme cases, the child will become the ward of the state and placed in a foster home. Somehow the legal world still hopes to sort out child custody and parental rights issues with the best interests of the child at heart and not leave the care and custody over o uninvolved guardians to the maximum possible effort.