Grandparental rights refer to the right of grandparents to see or have contact with their grandchildren after a divorce or breakup. Foster parents’ rights are usually primary, but grandparents can gain access if they can prove it would be harmful to remove them. Custody cases determine access to children, and in some cases, grandparents may sue for custody if the custodial parent puts the child in danger. It is recommended to try other strategies before resorting to legal action.
In a legal sense, grandparental rights refer to the rights grandparents may possess to see or have contact with children, usually after a divorce or other breakup has occurred in a family. While the rights of foster parents are often primary, in some jurisdictions courts may allow certain visits or access to children who may be against the wishes of the foster parents. They can be successful in gaining access to children if grandparents can build a successful case that their removal from the child or children’s lives would be destructive or harmful in any way. In the best possible scenarios, divorcing couples do everything they can to keep all of their grandparents involved in their children’s lives, but this doesn’t always happen, and some grandparents may take legal action to keep in touch with their grandchildren.
Usually if both parents share custody, the rights of the grandparents are not an issue because both parents can decide who the child will go with and when. Very often these cases are built around situations in which a parent loses custody rights, and this means that he or she cannot decide where her or her children go most of the time. If the visitation is conducted under any form of supervision, the parents of the noncustodial parent are generally excluded from the loop, and this may be for a very good reason or for no reason at all. Every custody case is different and not all jurisdictions recognize the rights of grandparents.
Grandparents often spent a lot of time with the children before their divorce, and taking away time can sometimes hurt the children in the future. Grandparents, even if they have behaved in such a way as to hinder the marriage or mistreat the custodial parent, could eventually ask for visitation rights. Where permitted, such a lawsuit may be successful, although in most cases such lawsuits will not involve any type of custody settlement. Most of the time they are limited to the grandparents right to visit or have children at their home to visit.
There are cases where grandparent rights mean the most and a grandparent might be suing their own child or a child’s ex-spouse for custody. This tends to occur when the custodial parent behaves in a way that puts the child in danger. Sometimes these allegations don’t end in a lawsuit, but instead end up with children being abducted from a home and placed in foster care. Although foster care systems tend to want to place children with relatives whenever possible, they may determine that grandparents would not make suitable guardians, and such a situation can be tragic for the child, particularly if the initial allegations against the parents were malicious and unfounded.
Custody cases help determine the best placement for children and who has access to them. In some jurisdictions the rights of grandparents may be determined in them or in separate cases brought before the family court. It is generally recommended that people avoid this measure and try all other possible strategies first, such as talking to each other and together with a mediator or counselor to see if there is a way to solve the problem with less acrimony.
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