Who has Parental Responsibility for a Child?

Parental responsibility is an expression that is often bandied about, and most people would think that all parents are responsible for their children’s care and upbringing. However parental responsibility is also a legal expression imposing duties on parents and giving them a bundle of legal rights.

These duties include the provision of a home for the child and to protect and maintain the child concerned. In addition it involves being responsible for disciplining the child, choosing and providing for his/her education, agreeing to a child’s medical treatment, naming the child and agreeing to a change of name and looking after the child’s property.

So who has parental responsibility? You might think that the easy answer is that both the child’s parents do. However it is not quite as straightforward as that, and issues can arise where the parents are separated.

The mother of the child automatically has parental responsibility for the child from its birth.

However it is not as automatic for a father, who will only have parental responsibility if either he is married to the child’s mother or is listed on the child’s birth certificate, usually as a result of the birth being jointly registered by the parents in the usual way.

Otherwise, an unmarried father who does not appear on the child’s birth certificate will not have parental responsibility unless he takes further steps to acquire it.

There are several ways in which this can be done:-

1. He can enter into a parental responsibility agreement with the mother. There is a prescribed document for this which has to be completed and signed in a certain way if it is to be fully effective.
2. Obtaining a court order granting the unmarried parent parental responsibility for the child in question.
3. Obtaining a Child Arrangements Order to the effect that the child lives with the unmarried father, as the effect of that order automatically grants parental responsibility to the father at the same time.

Same sex partners will both have parental responsibility if they were civil partners at the time of artificial insemination or fertility treatment.

The rules are different if the child is born in Scotland or elsewhere out of the UK.