My stepdad is officially my legal father after raising me with my mom since I was 9 years old. He’s an amazing human. You’re never too old to be adopted!

IANAL, but part of the reason stepparents tend to do these adoptions after the person is an adult is twofold. One, if a stepparent adopts a child. The non-custodial parent is generally not responsible for any future child support, and only has to back pay on any unpaid support. Whereas, normally they could still receive child support. Also, if the stepparent adopts a child, then divorces the custodial parent, that stepparent can be taken for child support.

I also know a guy that got talked into adopting his 12 year old stepdaughter, and selling his house so that he could get a beach house with his fairly new wife. She divorced him 7 months later, and remarried to birth father, and had supposedly planned it for a while. He had to pay child support for like 2 years before he got the divorce settled, ended up losing a lot of his assets in that horrible arrangement.

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