Whāngai Adoption - what you need to know
🌿 Whāngai is Māori customary adoption, when a child is raised by members of the whānau. It is not a formal adoption so it is generally not recognised by New Zealand law.
🌿 Whāngai is a customary Māori practice where a child is brought up by someone other than their birth parents – usually another relative. Whāngai may be temporary or permanent. A parent who takes on a child is called a matua whāngai, and the child is a tamaiti whāngai. The child knows both its birth parents and whāngai parents, and the whole community is usually involved in the decision.
🌿 Reasons for whāngai include:
* finding a home for an orphan
* taking in a child from a large family that was struggling to support all the children
* taking in a child whose parents were young
* grandparents taking in a mokopuna (grandchild) and teaching them tribal traditions
* allowing children to inherit land.
🌿 A whāngai adoption is recognised with regards to succession to Māori land. Also, whāngai parents (matua whāngai) of a child aged under six years can apply for paid parental leave for the period of time when the child begins living with them.
🌿 A child of a whāngai adoption (a tamaiti whāngai) cannot challenge a will under the Family Protection Act.
Image credit: The Spinoff / photo by Social Equity
Info credit: Citizens Advice Bureau NZ: cab.org.nz / Te Ara: teara.govt.nz
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Some Choice News!
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Why does this matter? As Nikki Macdonald from The Post points out, we’re a country with around 4,400 threatened species. With limited time and funding, conservation has always meant making tough calls about what gets attention first.
For the first time, DOC has put real numbers around what it would take to do everything needed to properly safeguard our unique natural environment. The new BioInvest tool shows the scale of the challenge: 310,177 actions across 28,007 sites.
Now that we can see the full picture, it brings the big question into focus: how much do we, as Kiwis, truly value protecting nature — and what are we prepared to invest to make it happen?
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