The summary: The Supreme Court is considering a case in which the grandparents of two girls have sued the mother for visitation rights. The father, their son, committed suicide in 1993. The grandparents had been granted visitation rights by the state of Washington, but the law in question has been criticized as too broad. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in June.
Should grandparents be able to go through the courts to get the legal right to see their grandchildren? Or does that interfere with the rights of the parents to rear their children without outside interference?
My opinion is that this has no business being a legal issue. Anyone who wants to spend time with a child, whatever the blood relationship with him or her, should go through the parent(s). Dragging them into court is not the best way to foster trust.
I agree. Grandparent visitation, by LAW, is silly. That being said, I think it is good for a child to be able to see their grandparents unless there is a good reason not to, but the parents should be the ultimate authority in this regard.
Interestingly, virtually every state in the Union now provides a mechanism for grandparents to establish a right to visitation, regardless of the objections of parents. The statute in Washington is one of the most liberal, which is why it is the battleground for the clash of ‘rights’.
The trouble is, what constitutes a good reason? Let’s say I don’t like my parents, I think they did a shtty job raising us, and I don’t want them around my kids (hell, I don’t even want them around my pets, but nevermind that). Now obviously, my parents don’t think they did a shtty job raising us. How does this one get resolved?
This example is clearly an oversimplification. But there are a lot of gray areas here. I think that the parents should have the authority to make these decisions, without the State butting in.
Never attribute to malice anything that can be attributed to stupidity.
– Unknown
Simple, the parents are the ultimate authority. There is no reason why grandparents should have visitation by law.
I think parents that deny their kids seeing their grandparents without a good reason is a bad decision, but I don’t society should be legislating every bad decision.
While I agree that there a few relationships more inviolable than the parent-child relationship, I have seen too many families in which the grandparents were the one bright spot in the children’s lives. I have known a good many people whose divorces were so full of spite & vindictiveness that the kids became pawns in a massive power struggle.
In many families, grandparents represent truly unconditional love as much as is humanly possible. Parents have the unenviable task of daily rule-enforcing, standard setting, and putting food on the table. Grandparents are for walks in the park, milkshakes when you don’t deserve them, and hugs when everyone else in the world is mad. All kids need this kind of relationship in their lives; children in single-parent, or step-family homes need it more, if anything.
In an ideal world, such laws would never be necessary; parents would do what is best for their kids and do whatever is needed to keep all of the grandparents involved in their kids’ lives. In the real world, unfortunately, sometimes the only way to do this is legal action, or the threat of legal action.
I know that many families don’t fit this idealized picture, and that there are clearly situations where a parent has very good reasons for wanting to keep the kids away from grandparents who are not a good influence. There are dingbats out there who don’t believe car seats are necessary, and whose houses are an accident waiting to happen. If you have recently escaped a marriage to someone you believe was severely warped by his/her upbringing, you might have very strong reasons for not wanting your kids exposed to these same people unsupervised. But the emotional backwash of a divorce may also skew your perspective a little bit as to whether this is truly the case.
While I don’t know the details of this case well enough to know if these grandparents are a positive influence in these kids’ lives, in many ways, I hope their rights to maintain a relationship with the kids is upheld. Such a precedent would really put pressure on other families to work out their problems & make reasonable compromises without court interference, which IMO is the best possible outcome.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
My parents are great. They’re divorced, but they’ve both got SO’s that are fabulous. So my kids actually have four grandparents just on my side (same way I grew up–my mom’s parents were divorced too).
Even though I had great parents, they were my parents, and not the parents of my kids. I hoped that my kids would be okay when my parents babysat for them. My parents essentially had to prove to me that my kids were safe and happy in their care.
I am all for grandparental involvement in kids’ lives, and I wish that more parents would make room for grandparents. I don’t think it’s something that should be required by law, though. The decision as to who a child should and should not spend time with needs to be left to the parents.
“The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his ribcage.” --anonymous redhead
When my ex mom-in-law found out about my divorce, she asked, “You’re still going to let me visit Greg aren’t you?”. She was really worried about that. I told her that of COURSE it was ok…it wasn’t her fault that we were getting divorced.
I WAS going to say, “Of course you can! It’s not your fault that your son’s a prick!” but I held my tongue.
MaryAnn
I’m sorry you didn’t win, mom, but I’ll give you a constellation prize! -Greg
The really interesting aspect to grandparental rights legislation is the reason for passage of such laws.
Inherently, there is no basic right which is being conserved. That is, unlike the bond between parent and child, created in the conception and protected with vigor by the state (unless your a Cuban boy with divorced parents who makes it to Miami), there is no natural bond between a grandchild and the grandparents. They have no right in the raising of the child, they have only a remote biological interest in the child (removed through their own children who have created the grandchild), and up until recently, society has only turned to them when it became necessary because of death or determination of unfitness of the parents. I doubt seriously the Supreme Court will rule that they have some fundamental right protected under the Constitution (as parents do).
Grandparents, however, are usually also part of the voting bloc known as the elderly. That voting bloc is strong, and often vocal. Parents, on the other hand, are part of the mainstream of America, which often doesn’t even make it out the door to vote, and which rarely votes as any sort of cohesive bloc. Therefor, grandparental visitation legislation panders to a vocal minority with strong feelings, without alienating a similarly strong bloc. Only when the parents are forced under some unusual circumstance to allow a grandparent more than they would wish does the issue become of interest to them.
It is for this reason among others that we have the Supreme Court.
This is something I have extremely mixed feelings about, as we are dealing with this issue in my own family, on both sides.
My husband has had a very rocky relationship with his parents, especially his mother. He suffered a lot of abuse growing up, because of his mother’s unbalanced mental state and his father’s alcoholism. Until our son is old enough to decide for himself (and defend himself) I can not allow him to visit unsupervised with his grandparents. Most of the time, we can’t allow him to visit them, even with his father, because of all the fighting that goes on in that household. Of course, this has led to many arguements and we’ve been threatened with a lawsuit on several occasions. Thank God, this has never happened but I still get very nervous. I’m not really afraid that the courts would force us to allow visitation (although there is that possibility), it’s more the financial and emotional costs that such a trial would bring.
On the other hand, my parents and I share the responsibility of raising my sister’s daughter. My parent’s have guardianship of my niece, but I’m sure that my sister could overturn it at anytime. Currently, my sister is on the outs with my parents, and we are worried that she might use her daughter against us. It would kill us to lose contact with Kayla, and I’m sure my sister knows that and would use it to her advantage. Basically, my parent’s would have to play by my sister’s rules or not get to see the child they have raised since birth (she’s five now). I think in this case the Grandparents should have rights.
I don’t know, this is such a messy issue. I guess it all boils down to what is in the child’s best interest.
In my jurisdiction, at least, this is precisely what it boils down to. We have a statute specifically allowing grandparents to petition for visitation of grandchildren, unless the children have been adopted in a non-family adoption. But the court may only grant such a petition if the judge finds the visitation to be in the best interests of the child. At least here, that is the rationale for allowing grandparental visitation in the first place – not as acknowledgement of the voting power of senior citizens, but as acknowledgement that it is generally in a child’s best interests to have the love and support of his or her grandparents, if the grandparents are willing and able to give it.
That said, I don’t think it’s a great law, either. I think parents should decide who their children see, not the courts. But in situations such as tatertot’s, I don’t think it would be hard to demonstrate that visitation is not in the child’s best interests.
Parents should be able to decide with whom their children spend their time. I can foresee a situation arising in my husband’s family that would cause us to keep the kids away from his parents. They’re jerks and I don’t like them anyway. It would suit me just fine if they had it out again and he decided to leave them alone for another year or so. I would never make a decision like that on my own - he would have to do it, they’re his parents.
But I definitely don’t want the courst telling me that my kids will see Mamaw and Papaw, or else. That smacks of great big old government, butting its ugly head into my family life. There’s enough of that already.
Jodi, no disrespect intended here, but if you really think the legislators of the great state of Montana actually sat down and passed a law regarding grandparental visitation rights solely because they thought it would be of value to kids, and without thinking of how it would play with senior citizens, I think you have a naive view of politics.
I’m not as naive as all that, Doug, but nor am I as jaded as you, apparently. I’m well aware that constituency influences virtually every decision made in politics, but I don’t believe constituecy was the sole rationale for these sorts of laws, as it might appear from your earlier post. As to this law specifically (or Montana’s version of it), the legislative history indicates that the “best interest of the child” was the stated reason for introducing the bill. Of course, I recognize that no bill sponsor would say “I’m sponsoring this because I live in fear of the AARP,” but at some point we have to credit legislators with passing laws for the reasons given, and not for some other, unspoken reason.
