I am 16 I live in WV

[Guest]

Can I legally runaway to live with my father? I’m currently adopted by grandparents but they emotionally put me down daily and I just want to live with my father who is ready to take me. Will I be okay to leave?

[ccsmod8]

RE: I am 16 I live in WV

Hello there –

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to reach out to us here at the National Runaway Safeline and posting on our public forum. By helping you during your crisis, hopefully there are other youth that are in similar situations can read this for help as well. Reading your post, we can see that you have very similar questions to a lot of our callers and you’re looking for some answers. Hopefully we can help.
As you have probably read throughout out our threads here, that we aren’t legal experts and that the age of majority does vary from state to state. So we aren’t going to go through that with you as you can find it easily. We want to make sure that you are safe doing whatever you decided to do.

Since you are exploring the option of going to your father’s house, you might have the option of getting your grandparents to give you permission to live there since they have legally adopted you. This would be more of a verbal agreement of course, since it would have to be brought to court to transfer custody officially. Generally you grandparents could give you either verbal or written agreement to live with someone else and then continue on until the agreement was up (depending on if it was a short term or long term solution). That way your grandparents would know where you are and won’t be able to file a runaway report. So that is something that you, your grandparents, and father can sit down and talk about and what that would look like.

Hope that this helps!