Grandparents Do Have a Preference-Based on Title 43
Video Transcribed: Are grandparents given preference in adoptions? Hi, I’m Oklahoma Grandparents Rights Attorney, Justin Mosteller, and I’m going to talk a little bit about preferences and adoptions.
Now grandparents do have a preference based on title 43 of the Oklahoma law, which basically puts them behind only the parents in terms of preference for placements and custody of a child.
However, in the adoption context, there are a lot of preferences that are in place. So there’s a preference for instance, that all of the siblings in the adoption case be placed together. That goes along with the preference for grandparents, but it can time override the preference for grandparents.
I once had a case where my client a grandmother, was the grandmother of only one of four children and was only willing to take custody and adopt her biological grandchild.
Now, in that case, the relationship and the bond between the siblings was more important than the preference for the grandmother, because the children had gone from home to home to home, they’d always gone together. And so that bond that those children had together, that was really important. And the court saw it as more important than placing the children with blood relatives, the kinship placement.
Now, in other scenarios, you might find that the preference of placing children with the grandparents is more important than the sibling connections. It just depends on the context and the facts of your specific case. So in all of these all these cases and all these issues, they really are highly individual.
But you can say that generally speaking, there is a preference, all else being equal, to adapt to a grandparent as opposed to a stranger to the family or any other relative, for that matter. Hopefully, this has answered that question for you. If you have any questions or concerns, comments, please reach out to us. We’d be happy to speak with you. And my name again is Justin Mosteller I am a Grandparents Rights Attorney in Tulsa,