There are many ways to make a family, and one way is to form a blended family when one or both spouses have children from previous relationships. Besides the emotional benefits of one spouse becoming the legal parent of the other spouse’s child, there are also significant legal advantages, including the right to make important decisions for the child such as decisions on education and medical care.
Unlike birth mothers, it isn’t always immediately apparent who fathers a child. So what happens in Arizona if the man a mother presumes is the father of her child refuses to acknowledge paternity or sign a Voluntary Acknowledgement of Paternity with the court and denies the child is his?
For divorcing couples with children, custody is almost always the most contentious issue and the one that most often leads to a contested divorce with the custody decision taken away from the parents and put in the hands of an impartial judge.
When a couple adopts a child they may wonder if they have the same rights as a biological parent. The experience of adopting a child shows parents firsthand what termination of parental rights really means as they typically witness the process of termination of the biological parent’s rights.
