[bin0280]

I am the mother of a 4 year old. The father and I split up in 2004, when the child was 2 years old. Since then, we have both moved (I stayed in Texas and he moved to another state) and I started another relationship with another man. My child calls my boyfriend "daddy", since he's been around for almost 2 years, and doesn't really know the biological father. He is ordered to pay child support and has court ordered visitation but neither is consistent. My child is now 4 years old and hasn't seen him since early 2005, one visit in over 2 years. He is currently behind on the support and hardly contacts our child. He pays one or two months and then stops paying once the court starts deducting his payments. Since he doesn't see the child and isn't consistently contacting or supporting the child, is there a way to terminate his rights without him having to consent?

[turbowray]

I would think that if he is paying child support, and only stopping this when it is deducted from his check, he is still consistant with the support, it is hard to follow your thread on this. If he has any kind of contact, phone contact, birthday card, etc, it would be hard to get an involuntary release of rights from the dad. Maybe knowing that child support would stop (but not the past due, just future), he would just want to sign over his rights. Have you asked him about this?

[bin0280]

Well, let's just say that the past 10 (almost 11) months, he's made only 2 full payments for the year, so he is behind 8-9 months in child support. Last year he was a few months behind but got paid up because he was going to be taken to court, so he found a way to get it all together and pay it off.

He hasn't been in contact with our child for at least 2 months (that was phone contact only). The last card recieved from him was about 6 months ago. He hasn't even seen our child in almost 2 years.

I was just weighing my options to see if I had any other choices than to just ask him, since he has had such limited contact with our child. I don't know where to start and didn't know who to ask, so I thought I would come on here and see if anyone had any advice. I don't want to fight/argue with him but if it comes down to it, I may just ask him and see what happens.

[rmet4nzkx]

The child's father has contact with the child, it matters not whether or not they are up to date with child support or whether or not they exercise their visitation rights if they have them. Whether or not you choose to enforce the child support orders or encourage visitation will have some impact. In general, unless the parent is unfit and you have someone else to adopt them such as a husband usually of 1 or more years, then the court would be harpressed to TPR. It is not advisable to have your child call another man, especially a boyfriend, "Daddy". Also TPR without adoption means that you would not be entitled to child support and the adoptive parent would be liable for child support should you break up.