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Cal. FAM § 8601

This is the official text of Cal. FAM § 8601, part of California’s Family Code — governs marriage, divorce, child custody and support, domestic violence protections, and adoption. This particular section falls under Division 13, “Adoption.”

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Official statutory text

(a) Except as otherwise provided in subdivision (b), a prospective adoptive parent or parents shall be at least 10 years older than the child.

(b) If the court is satisfied that the adoption of a child by a stepparent, or by a sister, brother, aunt, uncle, or first cousin and, if that person is married, by that person and that person’s spouse, is in the best interest of the parties and is in the public interest, it may approve the adoption without regard to the ages of the child and the prospective adoptive parent or parents.

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.