Recent Supreme Court Ruling
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The relationship between a grandparent and a grandchild can be one of great joy and importance for both grandparent and youngster. But sometimes an event such as a parent's death, divorce or estrangement can tear families apart and alter or sever relationships. After such events, the child's parents or guardian may block any further contact with grandparents, who may take legal steps to maintain contact with the children they love.
As such situations became increasingly common, in the 1970s state legislatures began enacting "grandparent visitation" statutes to protect the visitation rights of grandparents and other caretakers. Today, all 50 states have some type of grandparent visitation law. These statutes allow grandparents to ask a court to give them the legal right to maintain their relationships with their children's children.
Visitation statutes, however, do not give a grandparent an absolute right to visitation, and the laws vary widely from state to state on crucial details such as who may petition for visitation rights, under what circumstances a grandparent may file such a petition, and on what legal grounds the petition will be granted. Perhaps most importantly, a 2000 U.S. Supreme Court ruling gives priority to the wishes of the parents in resolving visitation disputes, and this ruling is changing state courts' interpretation of visitation statutes (see below).
The states differ on the extent to which parents have a right to control their children's upbringing. Some states have viewed visitation by grandparents as only a small infringement on the right of a parent to raise a child. These states focus on what is in the "best interest of the child" in making decisions about whether or not to allow grandparents to visit. In these "permissive" states, even unrelated caretakers can often petition for visitation rights, and grandparents can seek visitation even in cases where the family is intact (i.e., there has not been a divorce or a death in the family). In these states, courts may award grandparents visitation rights even if the parents object.
Other states are more protective of a parent's right to decide what is best for the child. They have "restrictive" visitation statutes, meaning that generally only grandparents, not other caretakers, have visitation rights, and these rights may be pursued only if the child's parents are divorcing, one or both parents have died, or the child was born out of wedlock. In other words, in these states the parents in intact families have the final word on whether or not grandparents are allowed to visit.
To download an American Bar Association chart in PDF format outlining visitation rights in the 50 states, go to: https://www.abanet.org/family/familylaw/Chart6_ThirdPartyVisitation.pdf
(If you do not have the free PDF reader installed on your computer, download it
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