When Parents Can't Meet Responsibilities

What happens when parents can't or don't take care of their children? There is some financial aid for parents who can't afford to support their children. But what if a parent is too ill to care for a child, refuses to provide proper care for a child, or cannot break a pattern of severely abusing a child? 

A child who is neglected or abused is, by law, a deprived child. If a child is found to be deprived by the juvenile court, he or she may be removed temporarily or permanently from the parent's home. The juvenile court might place the child in the temporary legal custody of the county DFCS. DFCS can place deprived children in emergency care facilities, group homes, or with relatives.

Sometimes, DFCS places the children under the care of foster parents. Foster parents are temporary parents licensed by the state or designated by the court to care for children. They may be relatives of the child. Often foster parents are simply a couple who wish to help such children.

If necessary, the juvenile court can terminate all of a parent's rights regarding a child. It can do so if the parent has completely abandoned or severely neglected or abused the child. Abandoning a child means the parent has failed to pay child support or to communicate with the child for over a year.

Termination of a parent's rights means much more than taking the custody of a child away from a parent. After termination, the parent will have no further right to see the child or to inherit from the child, nor will the child have the right to inherit from the parent. The child may be adopted without the biological parent's knowledge or consent.

Understandably, courts are extremely reluctant to take these measures. The bias of the law supports parents caring for their own children. Termination will not be permitted without a full investigation and court hearing. The child must be represented by a lawyer at the hearing. The parent may choose to be represented at the hearing.

Under what conditions do you think the juvenile court should completely terminate the rights of a parent to a child? If a parent is mentally ill? very poor and uneducated? without a home? What should be the general rule?

The Supreme Court of Georgia has said that parental rights can only be terminated under certain circumstances:

• There is the present (not past) inability of a parent to care for the child.
• The deprivation is likely to continue.
• The continued deprivation is likely to cause serious physical, mental, emotional, or moral harm to the child.
• The court must also find that it is in the child's best interest that parental rights be terminated.

When parents' rights to their children are ended, the court must appoint a guardian for the children. Guardians, under Georgia law, are persons responsible for minor children or others who cannot care for themselves. (Natural parents are called natural guardians.) Usually, a temporary guardian is named. A permanent home and guardian are then found. The permanent home might be with a relative or with permanent foster parents. If the child is adopted, the adoptive parents become the guardians.