What are my responsibilities for support as a stepparent?

The changing family dynamic over the years has revealed a portrait of families that is nowhere near the traditional view that we have been accustomed to.  Today many households contain at least one stepchild under the age of eighteen.  With this comes the concern of what responsibilities to a stepchild are there once the relationship or marriage is over.

As a general rule, stepparents are not legally obligated to provide support to stepchildren.  The biological parents of a child have a legal duty to support their children, and this duty is not displaced by the custodial parent’s marriage to a new spouse, or by the fact that the parent may be cohabitating with another person.

Florida has no law that requires such support for a spouse who does not legally adopt the child as his own or contract, either expressly or impliedly, to care for and support the child as his own beyond the period of time that he stood in loco parentis (in the place of a parent) to the child by virtue of the marriage relationship to the child’s mother.  A man has no legal duty to provide support for a child which is neither his natural or adopted child and for whose care and support he has not contracted.  An exception to this is made in the case of someone who stands in loco parentis to the child.

Divorce between a man and a child’s mother terminates any relationship of loco parentis between the man and the child, and the man has no legal duty to provide support after whether the child was by a previous marriage or was born during the marriage but was fathered by another.