Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Divorcing Your Parents

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

It really happens! But most people call it emancipation of a minor. Either way, there's some interesting legal stuff in here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. Hey and welcome to the short stuff.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're just a couple of bros, maybe even a couple of bras, hanging out doing our thing, talking about cool stuff and that makes the short stuff because it's a short version of that. That's right. We're going to talk about divorcing your parents today. Shout out to a bunch of law firms and law schools for this one, right? Yeah. Blacks Law Dictionary.

Love to know, Cornell Law School in the Virgo law firm. That's right because when you're talking about divorcing your parents, well first of all, we can't not mention your reconcilable differences because we'll just get too much mail. Have you ever seen it? I did not see that. This was the movie from 1984 with the precocious young Drew Barrymore divorcing her parents and I think one of them was Ryan O'Neill, right? Who was the other?

Shelly Long. Oh, of course. So would that mean that she was fresh off of the terrible mistake of leaving Cheers or about to be? 84. I feel like that's during Cheers. Does seem like that, doesn't it? Yeah, I think so.

So yeah, little Drew Barrymore divorces her parents and it seems like, okay, does that actually happen? Yeah, it totally does happen. They don't call it divorcing your parents, but it's a legal proceeding called the emancipation of a minor. I think kids on the playground probably call it divorcing your parents. Yeah. That's what I'd call it.

Todd divorces parents. Did you hear that? Yeah. I would totally say that. Yeah, but legal emancipation, that is the legal term when a child basically steps forward and says, well, it depends on what state you're in as far as what we call being the age of legal majority and each state has their own age for that. But depending on where you are, it could be 18 years old that you're a legal adult and

you are on your own as far as being a legally major. California is very low as far as when you can emancipate, most states it's about 16, but in California because of the movie industry, because it's a very common thing in the movie industry to get emancipated from your parents, not because even for the fact that you want to leave them necessarily, it just makes things a lot easier sometimes for your career. Yeah, because legally until you reach the age of majority, your parents basically own you. You have much fewer legal rights than you do as an 18 year old on.

But in return, your parents are supposed to hold up their end of the bargain. They have legal obligations and responsibilities to care for you, to clothe you, to make sure you go to school, to make sure that your health is taken care of, your medical treatments are seen too. And so if the parents break that contract, kids can say, my parents not doing a very good job of this, I don't want to have anything to do with them, I want to basically take care of myself. I'm not 18 yet, so I want to become emancipated and basically speed up that time to legal

majority. Yeah, and like I said in the film industry, a lot of times a parent will be behind this and they'll still live at home even, but it just makes certain aspects of running their career and their life a little bit easier if they're emancipated. But sometimes there are actors and we'll get into the sad cases of why else a kid might do this. But in some cases, there are kid actors that aren't necessarily from LA and their parents live in Oklahoma and the kid goes off and lives on their own in an apartment when they're

15 years old. Yeah, I think it also protects the child's earnings too, because your parents can basically spend the money that you're earning if you're under the legal age of majority. So I think that's also a big reason why it happens in Hollywood among child actors most of all. Yeah, and if you are emancipated as a kid, you can do most of the things, obviously if you can't drive if you're not legal driving age or drink or vote or things like that, it doesn't change anything like that.

But you can sign a contract on your own without a parent having to co-sign. You can work and keep that money, like you said. You can get that apartment if you want to. You can sue somebody. You can get sued by somebody. You can pick out what school you want to go to. A lot of rights are granted to you. Kind of the decisions, like you said, that an adult would make, you can now make.

Right. There are some things that you can't do. You're not allowed to drop out of school unless you're actively pursuing a GED. That's a big one. I didn't see what the penalties are of that. Like I don't know how they would keep you from doing that, but supposedly that's part of the bargain. And then also, if you're not of the age of consent to be married, you can't marry without

your parents' consent even if you're already emancipated, unless in a bunch of states, if you're already pregnant and you're a minor, or you already have a child and you're a minor, you can marry without parental consent. That's right. Why don't we take a break and we'll talk, aside from being in the film industry, some other reasons why you might want to divorce your parents and then how you might want to go about that. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place

be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard tree house and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

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you listen to podcasts. All right. So we mentioned movie star kids. Sometimes that's a very common thing in California to emancipate from your folks. The sad other half of this is you're a kid in a very bad home life and a bad situation who has parents that aren't taking care of you like they should or possibly abusing you. And this is when a kid can step forward and these are, this is a whole different thing when you go to the court and say, Hey, I, uh, cause in California, you know, it's so

common. It's a very open and shut process. It's very speedy and it's not a big deal. But if you go in there and say, Hey, I want to emancipate from my parents because I don't get the care I deserve or I'm being abused. And it becomes almost like a trial. Yeah. So, um, if that's the circumstance that you're seeking emancipation for, um, yeah, it is.

It's a legal proceeding where both sides get to offer evidence and argue their case. Your parents have to be notified of these proceedings so that they can show up and contest it and be like, no, we want to be able to keep stealing his newspaper money. Um, or for whatever reason they want to contest it. So it is very much like a legal proceeding, but here's, there's a lot of weird catches to this. And this is why this is so fascinating to me is in a lot of states, maybe even all states, if you are under the age of legal majority, you cannot seek relief from a court on your

own. The court basically doesn't recognize you as somebody who can, like, like you said earlier, sue people or be sued in court. So they have to assign specific people to you, not even lawyers necessarily, but they're called guardian ad litems. And they're basically advocates for the kid, working for the kid's best interests in these cases. Right.

So are they the ones that technically have to file this, uh, motion? Yes. Yes. So yeah, I think in some states the kid can, but I think in most cases that guardian ad litem has to, or you can, you know, if you already have a bunch of newspaper money saved up, you can hire your own lawyer to do this too. And I guess technically a parent could do so, but if you're trying to divorce your parents, that's kind of counterintuitive, unless it's a situation where, uh...

It's mutual. Well, or there's, well, for sure, that'd be super sad, but if there was like a one really bad parent and the other parent thought maybe the only way out was to approve emancipation or whatever. Yeah. Could be. That'd be a messy legal case right there. It really would, because when you go to, um, go in front of the judge, there's a lot of

things that they're considering here, right? Yeah. They, first of all, they're like, why do you want to be emancipated? And just to say like my parents suck, LOL, is not going to work. Like there's some legal reasons that you have to have. The judge would say they all suck. I'm sorry. Right.

Like, um, neglect or abuse or abandonment, all that kind of stuff. Or you know, I have a career and I need to be able to enter contracts my own or whatever. And the, based on those set of legal reasons, the thing will proceed forward and the court's going to take a bunch of different stuff into consideration, like, um, what your age is, how mature you are, um, what, what your health is like, uh, so, because I mean, if you have like a, if you need support, say like with mental health, they're probably not going to emancipate you unless you can prove that you're going to be able to take care of this on your own.

Um, they're going to look at your parents and how your parents have behaved too, right? Sure. Um, I wonder how much of this, like when does law enforcement get involved? If it's like cases of abuse, like surely that comes into play too, right? I don't know. I would think that especially if you're under the age of even possibly emancipating yourself, that you're just, you just become a ward of the state in those cases. Oh man, it's so sad.

Yeah. Um, they're going to look obviously to see if you can support yourself, um, if you, like the maturity thing that comes into play, into play there, like, can you go out and find a job and get an apartment on your own, like, is this even possible? Or, you know, I guess there are plenty of situations where you go live with, uh, another family member or a friend or something like that. It's not like you have to go out and get a mortgage or something like that. No, but I mean, imagine being a 16 year old and you're like, I'm out on my own now and

I've got to work and pay for an apartment and go to school because again, remember you can't drop out of high school, but there's another twist to all this. There's another caveat, Chuck. A lot of states have labor laws, child labor laws, so you might become emancipated or go to become emancipated and find out you can't be because you can't legally support yourself. Yeah. And that's, um, in the cases of the child actors, it's not like that's a way they can skirt like, um, now all of a sudden they can just, all the labor laws as of an adult applies

to them. That's not true at all. They still have the child labor laws that they have to follow. Uh, they still have to have schooling, even if it's a fancy schmancy tutor that's like driving you towards the GED. Um, but you know, you have to, as a kid, like you have to have some means of supporting yourself and also consider that you're, you're still a kid that's one, gonna want to do kid stuff. And like, there's just so much, it's just devastating to think that this might be a kid's

only way out, is to forego essentially a childhood to emancipate themselves. Yeah. The whole thing is super interesting, like on the surface, but yeah, if you dig into it like you did, it becomes super depressing all of a sudden. It's not a regret even choosing this topic. Sorry about that. Um, you got anything else? I got nothing else.

All right, well, I'm bummed out and Chuck's got nothing else, so short stuff away. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.