A lot of you have asked me a number of questions following my post on child maintenance and support. Most of them are more or less the same so I thought it best to offer some clarity and hopefully some of you may get closure from that answer.
1. Can I sue my father for the years of neglect I endured as a child and for unpaid/arrear maintenance?
Think of maintenance as an operating expense (costs that keep the business running). In other words, maintenance is the sum of costs that cover the care and upkeep of the child day to day.
It is a duty that a parent owes to their child and if they are not supportive, the other supporting parent should sue on behalf of the child and if the child is under the guardianship (care) of an aunt, grandmother or some other person, that person should sue for child support for as long as there are expenses to be paid. Suing for maintenance means the supporting parent is demanding a refund of their previous and ongoing expenses because instead of only contributing half the costs, the supporting parent is forced to cover 100% of the care and upkeep of the child.
More to the point, maintenance cannot be sued for after 21 years because it will be impossible to quantify your monthly needs since you were a child, mostly because you did not know how much it cost to raise you. Only your other parent or your guardian actually knew at the time. For that reason, maintenance must be claimed while the child is still growing and in need of it. In short the answer is NO. You cannot claim maintenance as an adult for what you were denied over a period of at least 20 years.
On a side note, the underlying issue to this question is neglect and the question of why cannot be answered at law. But perhaps one may find closure after undergoing counselling just to come to terms with the pain. I would be doing you wrong if I did not make it clear that not all problems can be solved by the law or courts of law.
2. Can I remove/replace the name of the biological father of my child on the birth certificate?
A father`s name is placed on the birth certificate for 2 reasons. He fathered that child or he adopted that child as his. As long as the child`s biological father is alive, he CANNOT, for any reason be removed from the child`s birth register. Even if he is neglectful, a criminal or any negative character you may assign to him, he has a right to be on the record. The same way, DNA cannot be erased from a person; a biological father CANNOT be removed.
There are those who have been able to register their spouses as biological parents of their children (without adoption consent) and this is a result of loopholes that used to be there in our system and that was before DNA test results became a requirement for adding the name of a father to a birth register. A case like that is not the rule, it is a loophole that can be challenged and changed anytime.
Adoption of a child requires that both parents give their written consent. The only time a step parent can be added to the birth register of a child to replace that of the biological father is only when the biological father has written consent giving away his/her right to another person. The effect of that change is that the biological parent is exempted from paying maintenance.
I hope this nugget irons out the kinks and solves the puzzle for some of you who have been wondering. Look out for more nuggets next week.
