Every so often, a client wants to know if there’s a way to involuntarily terminate the parental rights of their child’s other parent.

Terminating someone’s parental rights isn’t an easy proposition — it’s definitely nothing to be done lightly. However, there are times it’s the right thing to consider. Sometimes, a parent goes absent for years without showing any sign of support for the child. Sometimes, someone should just never have been a parent in the first place.

If you believe that having your child’s other parent remain in his or her life is actually harmful to him or her, here’s what you should know about your options.

Texas is serious about a parent’s obligation to support their children. If you have any doubt about it, just take a look at some of the recent arrests that have been made for failure to pay support.

In what has been described as a “multi-agency operation” orchestrated by the combined efforts of the Longview Police Department, the Texas Attorney General Office and the Gregg County Sheriff, six major offenders who had skipped out on their child support payments were taken into custody.

The officers involved in the busts began serving simultaneous warrants on individuals at 4:00 a.m. on March 11. The authorities stress that this is the beginning of their efforts to round up “deadbeat” parents — so more arrests are likely to follow soon.

Adopting a stepchild can be a wonderful experience — and a move that will cement your family together forever. However, stepparent adoptions have some unique concerns that should be addressed.

Let’s talk about some of those concerns and discuss ways to deal with the issues that may arise:

1. The reason the birth parent is not in the picture

The government shutdown of 2018-2019 has left approximately 800,000 federal workers without pay — but that’s just the start of the real human toll that’s being exacted from the budget fight being waged. The families of all of those federal workers are also affected.

What do you do if you are a federal worker who has now missed a paycheck while the government shutdown goes on and you owe child support or spousal support (or both)? You know that it’s uncertain whether or not you’ll eventually see your back pay — and you may have no idea how long it will take since it’s far from automatic.

Here are some tips:

The road to “happily ever after” can be full of unexpected twists and turns. That was certainly true for one Michigan couple after they found out that the wife’s Texas divorce was never finalized decades before.

Both halves of the couple appear to have struggled to find true love before meeting on MySpace in 2010. The husband, a father of four, had divorced in 2000. The wife, a mother of five, had divorced her first husband way back in 1993 — or so she thought.

It turns out that the judge who had heard her divorce petition died shortly after. In the aftermath of his death, something happened to the woman’s paperwork and the final divorce decree was never entered into the official record by the Clerk of Courts. People commonly assume that their divorce is legal the moment that the judge signs the decree, but that’s not true until the decree makes it into the official records.