Mediate Michigan

If you and your child’s mother are not married when the child is born, you may feel like a second-class citizen. You probably think that your rights are completely contingent upon the whims of your child’s mother. You may be afraid that you could lose the ability to live with or visit your child. Fortunately, though, Michigan laws recognize that you have rights when it comes to your children. The laws make it possible for you to be legally listed as the child’s father, to make a claim for custody or visitation and to have the ability to make decisions about how your child is raised.

How to Prove You Are the Child’s Father

Michigan — like most other states — has several different ways to recognize a child’s parentage. Obviously, the most common way for a father to be legally established is for the parents to be married at the time of the child’s birth. If the parents are married, the law automatically presumes that the husband is also the father of the child. This presumption can be rebutted, but the burden of rebutting it is on the person bringing the challenge against the man’s parentage.

If the parents are unmarried, the law allows a man to be legally recognized as the father of a child if both he and the child’s mother sign and file what is known as an “acknowledgement of parentage” form. This form is legally binding and puts the world on notice that both the mother and father recognize that the man is the biological father of the child in question.

via Unmarried Fathers Have Rights, Too – U.S. Politics Today – News Media Monitoring.