I ask this question following a “cry for help” I saw on an Israeli web forum.
The original poster there is an observant Jew, but apparently not radical. Her (ex-) husband’s parents are ultra-orthodox Jews.
She and her husband are getting a divorce. Her ex-husband’s parents are trying to take the opportunity, and get custody of the kids. Their real reason, obviously, is to take the kids into their Hasidic court, as the parents are “not religious enough”. The formal claim is that the parents are incapable of raising the kids.
She also wrote that she consulted legal aid, and they said that if the parents can’t afford an apartment with a separate room for each kid, the grandparents may indeed win the custody suit.
Does it make sense? Can’t poor families raise kids? Or was she misguided?
The way you’ve phrased this doesn’t imply that it’s illegal to have two kids share a bedroom. Perhaps legal aid was saying that, all other things being equal, the courts would be more likely to grant custody to the family which could give the kids more living space.
Almost every jurisdiction has laws against residential overcrowding, but I doubt any of them are phrased in such a way as to unconditionally bar two children from sharing a bedroom.
If the issue arose on an Israeli web forum, is US law remotely relevant to how it will be decided? Surely the matter is one for the Israeli courts, applying Israeli law?
I would be very surprised, in the US, if parents ever lost custody to grandparents simply because they were not prosperous enough to provide the kids with accommodation large enough to give each of them a separate room.
(Frankly, I’d be surprised if that was the case in Israel, either. I suspect that possibly the full nuances of the legal advice given may not have been conveyed in the web forum posting.)
In the United States, grandparents have a very difficult timing getting visitation rights for their grandchildren, let alone custody. I sincerely hope she has retained an attorney for the divorce proceedings and listens to her attorney. These grandparents are trying to bully and scare her. I don’t know what context the legal aid person (was it an attorney?) could have said something like this, I hope she will talk to her attorney about this.
Not necessarily relevant: you can use bunk beds out of your free choosing. But you may have to prove that you could place each kid in his/her own room.
It does sound strange to me, but I’m not from the states, and know very little of your legal system.
In a custody battle as between parents and grandparents, there is a very strong preference for the parents, and it would require compelling facts to have the kids taken from parents and given to grandparents. “The parents can’t give them each a separate room!” doesn’t even come close.
You say that the “formal claim” is that the parents are incapable of raising the kids. That’s good grounds for removing the kids, but it needs to be established by facts, evidence. If the attempt to prove it revolves to any extent around evidence of the parents’ inability to provide separate rooms, it will be laughed out of court.
Sorry about that - a partial response to Quartz that was posted too soon.
psychonaut:
I don’t know how many kids share a bedroon there. I asked her, as I guess it does matter if its two kids per room, or ten.
UDS:
The OP and the grandparents are all in the states. I assume she immegrated from Israel, so it’s more natural for her to ask here.
Alley Dweller:
Thanks, I’ll read the link. I don’t know whom the legal consultant was, but from the post the OP appears to be rather poor, so I’m sure it’s nothing fancy.
I do know that if adopting a child you have got to have 1 kid per bedroom. It doesn’t matter if they were identical twins, there has to be 1 per room … [and if what Jason says is correct, a certain amount of money actually in the bank on top of the fees.]
Not sure how it works if the kid is already yours, they should really contact a lawyer.
I have known cases where that was not required: a friend of mine foster-adopted and the requirement was a certain amount of square footage (and it wasn’t much) and a dresser drawer per kid. So you could put one kid in a very small room, two in a small-to-medium room, and three or more in a big room. I also knew a family once that had like 17 kids, half bio and half adopted. They certainly did not have their own rooms.
My sister has two sons, adopted at different times, who share a bedroom. Some states or some adoption agencies may require that a child gets his or her own room in their adoptive family home, but it isn’t universal in the US.
For some reason I remember learning that here in Troll Country, you can have a maximum of two people per room in an apartment or house. Not bedroom, room, and it’s possible they count the kitchen in that. When you hear about how crowded living conditions got in European cities after World War II, this makes a certain amount of sense. Still, I’ve only heard of it being enforced in pretty extreme situations, and never when it involves a single family. (Think construction workers brought in from really depressed regions of eastern Europe, and housed by unscrupulous employers six or eight grown men to a bedroom.)
God, I hope not - at one point me and my three siblings were all sharing one bedroom.
Now, legal authorities/child services/courts/whatever might well mandate that children be separated by gender, so if you have two kids, one girl one boy, there might be a requirement for separate bedrooms, but I’ve never heard that you couldn’t double-up same-gender kids in the same room.
Not sure what the “Hasidic Court” reference is. The divorce is being mediated by the religious authorities?
Is there a strict Jewish law interpretation that boys and girls be separated, even at a young age?
OTOH, it often boils down to - the father lives with his parents after separation, and so uses their promise of support to win custody based on the financial assistance, living space, etc. that those grandparents can chip in for. Built-in full time babysitters and big house have a distinct edge over poor working single mother with limited resources - especially if the judge feels it important to pretend he has no bias for the mother. Maybe because they are providing primary care on behalf of the father, they suggest they should get formal custody?
The answer to the question that is the title to the thread is no. Grandparents typically can get custody from a child’s parents against the parents’ wishes only in rare, extreme circumstances (abuse, evidence of significant neglect, etc.) Being poor is not generally sufficient unless the family is so poor that the child’s life is in danger. (Even then, it’s going to be very fact-dependent.)
U.S. courts will consult religious law when a private contract is based on it as a way of understanding what the parties were agreeing to when they made the compact. But religious rules of conduct have no bearing in family law decisions – it is a parent’s right to raise her children in any religion she wishes.
All of that said, the U.S. court system, like every institution and more than some, is susceptible to the levers of manipulation that money can buy. If the grandparents are that much more well off, then the mother needs to get a lawyer.
Speaking in generalities-- It’s really beyond just a strong preference. Most states say that a grandparent has no more right to custody of a child than a stranger. For example, if the parents both died, custody of the children would not automatically go to the grandparents (unless it was in their will). The grandparents would have to apply for custody and would not be treated with preference over an unrelated person.
In order for the grandparents to get custody, the parents would BOTH have to be patently unfit (with parental rights legally terminated), dead, OR the grandparents must already be caring for the child full time with no or virtually no parental participation.
On the other hand, the courts will generally support a fit parents’ decision to forbid the children from ever seeing their grandparents again.
Based only on my limited experience, and a generalized view of the law, I find the claim that grandparents will be granted custody over fit parents solely because the parents don’t have 1 bedroom per child in their home, to be laughable. There may, of course, be more to the story. The parents could have a history of sustained neglect charges, or it may merely be the case that the attorney told them their case would be stronger if….
Personal anecdote:
I knew a woman who lost custody of her son because he didn’t have his own bedroom.
Sidenote: She was crushed in by the rich ex-husband and his high-priced attorney. Strangely enough, the fact that she couldn’t afford a two-bedroom place was because the ex-husband refused child support never came up because in California, failure to pay support is not (cannot? calling Bearflag!) be considered on custody/visitation issues.
The suburb where I used to live had a maximum occupancy rule for housing based on some sort of people/bedroom formula. That wasn’t based on child welfare, though, it was to keep people who owned single-family homes from bringing in non-relatives or renting out their basements to another family.
There are some rules. Some of them are set by companies or agencies rather than by law.
For example, in Washington state, Section 8 housing (a program that pays the rent for low-income families) mandates no more than 2 kids per room, and that a boy and girl cannot share a room. I remember renting to a family from Iran who had left a situation there where 12 people shared 400 square feet. He was blown away that we were insisting he needed 900 square feet for 5 people.