Me and my wife recently took her 12 year old second cousin into our home. He's been bounced around between living with his (unmarried and separated) parents, both of whom are drugs addicts and unable/uninterested in raising him, and living with his grandma, with whom he's lived for the past 3 years when she discovered that he was regularly missing about 40-50 days of school every year while he lived with his mom.
This summer, his grandma told us she couldn't handle him anymore now that he's fallen in with a bad crowd, so we offered to have him live with us for the school year and possibly beyond, since we have a spare bedroom and live in a good school district.
We got the mom to sign a form showing that he's living with us and which allows us to make decisions on his behalf in relation to school issues and decisions, but we don't have any legal custody or anything like that. He's been living with us since mid-August.
We were talking with the grandma today and she confided that she suspects that her daughter (the kid's mom) has used the kid's social security number to open up credit card accounts in his name and probably is ruining his credit.
Is there anything we, as his caretakers, can do about this? Can we arrange to have his credit report frozen to prevent any accounts being opened in his name? Do we need to have full, legal, custody to be able to do anything if we find that parents have in fact opened accounts in his name? what can we do to try to start to rehabilitate his credit?
This kid has had a rough life and if there's anything we can do to stop his mom from making it worse, we want do to it.
We're in Seattle, Washington. Kid's mom currently lives in Skokomish (but is being evicted next month and we have no idea where she'll live next). The kid's dad (my wife's first cousin) is in a drug rehab facility in Colorado, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and is completely out of the picture.
tl;dr: We took a 12y/o boy into our home, we think Mom is ruining the kid's credit, and we need to know if/how to stop this and begin repairing his credit.
Submitted September 30, 2017 at 06:28PM by JacobBenWolf http://ift.tt/2xTFVnP
