Cohabitants and children

Do cohabiting parents have the same rights and responsibilities towards a child as married couples?

In most circumstances, parents will have the same rights and responsibilities towards their child regardless of their marital status (and vice versa – children's rights do not depend on the marital status of their parents).

To take parental responsibility first, this essentially means the right to make important decisions about a child, for example about where they should live, where they should go to school, and what medical treatment they should or should not receive (see 'What does 'parental responsibility' mean?' for more detail).

Where both parents have parental responsibility (as is usually the case) it is generally accepted that day-to-day decisions, such as what the child should eat, what clothes to wear, what medicine to take when feeling unwell, school homework, seeing friends and attending parties, etc, as well as decisions on emergency medical treatment, are taken by the parent in whose care the child is at the relevant time, without having to consult with or obtain the consent of the other parent. 

However, any important decisions on a child’s welfare should be made jointly, and the family court has the power to intervene where there is a dispute on these decisions (such as choice of school or time spent with each parent) which the parents have not been able to resolve between them whether directly, with the assistance of solicitors or, for example, in mediation. 

A child's birth mother will automatically have parental responsibility on the birth of her child. A child's father or non-biological parent will automatically have parental responsibility if he / she was married to the mother at the time of the child's birth. 

A non-birth parent who was not married at the time of the birth will not automatically have parental responsibility but can acquire it in a number of ways - including by being registered as the child's parent on the birth certificate; by marrying the birth mother; by entering into a parental responsibility agreement with the birth mother and filing it at court; by obtaining a court order giving him/her parental responsibility; or by obtaining a court order that the child shall live with him/her or an adoption order. A father or non-biological parent who has parental responsibility then has the same rights to make important decisions about the child, regardless of how they came to have parental responsibility.

We have not here covered the acquisition of parental responsibility by step-parents, same sex parents, surrogacy or adoption, but we can advise on all of these matters.

In terms of the financial obligations that a parent has toward a child (which are technically tied to the fact of being a parent rather than having parental responsibility), these are the same regardless of a parent's marital status ). See 'Does one parent have to pay child maintenance to the other following separation?' and all of our other FAQs about children issues following divorce or separation here.