Should grandparents have the right to access their grandchildren if the parents don't want this?

[Life2Short4Nonsense]

Came across a discussion about the rights of grandparents to see the grandchildren if this goes against the parents' wishes.

Should grandparents be able to use the courts to get access to their grandchildren or should the parents be able to decide, as long as they are fit parents?

YABU: Grandparents should have the right to have access, unless a judge decides otherwise.

YANBU: The parents should decide, unless the parents are unfit to parent.

@kikisparks

But is it in the best interests of the child that the parent has to engage a lawyer and put emotional and financial energy into a court battle to prove it is not in their child’s best interests to see the GPs?

Impossible to say. In many circumstances not. But context dependent.

It's pretty rare that GPs undertake court action and rarer still that they are successful.

This is a very ignorant viewpoint.

My father is estranged to me for entirely justified reasons, he is a bad bastard. I would use all my fight and might to keep him away from my precious children. Luckily they have two sets of loving, committed grandparents but even if they didn’t, no grandparents would be preferable over the monster that is my bio father.

My children are 8, 6 & 4 years old. They would make all sorts of terrible life choices if given the opportunity, I advocate for them in many respects, as many responsible parents do.

YouveGotAFastCar
I don’t think many people are cutting off grandparents, or any type of support and family for their children, without good reason.

I don’t know that life is as simple as that. People lose contact due to location, death or divorce.

If you have a grandparent that can’t travel and a parent who either has too much going on, just doesn’t really get on with gp it’s easy for everything to stop.

If we hadn’t made the effort to see other side of family as adults we wouldn’t have- mum and dad lived extremely far away and my dad and his family had issues later in life (that wouldn’t have impacted on us and didn’t make them or him bad people, my parents and them just disagreed) so when my dad died my mum just let that entire part of her life slide.

My DS has no contact with my dad and step mum as my step mum is a horrific abuser and my dad enables her. It has taken me decades of therapy to reach my current wonderful life, I am not putting DS through that. He doesn’t have contact with step FIL and very limited contact with MIL because the police and social services have warned us that step FIL poses a significant risk to children due to allegations made against him.

That is of course very sad - devastating - for the grandparents but I don't believe they should have any legal right to try to obtain access. It is not their child, and children can thrive without any grandparents.

Court and court-ordered access would constitute enforced labour on the mother of the child, and I think her right to peace and to be able to get on with raising her child as she sees fit should matter more than if granny and grandad get kid cuddles every other Sunday.

If there is a concern that the mother has cut contact as part of being an unfit parent there should be a legal way to be able to challenge that, which there already is through social services.

I have to confess something.

Although I don't have children, I am estranged from my own family and that's due to my parents constantly fighting. I grew up very anxious and unhappy and couldn't wait to leave the house. Even after I left I still had to deal with their fights when I visited and after more than 10 years, I couldn't take it anymore.

The idea that if I'd had children that my parents could force contact via the courts, makes me feel al little ill. I initially made a post detailing my own thoughs on this issue, but I did not want to taint the poll, so I endeavoured to be more neutral in my intial post.

And how is that decided by a judge then? My dad abused me as a small child, I have no proof though, so no charges; presumably a court would grant him access to my child so he could sexually abuse her too.

Would this judgement also mean parents can’t move abroad or too far away from the grandparents? What happens when the grandparents get very elderly and maybe aren’t safe to care for a child on their own, is there some kind of assessment to be done with an outside agency?

@Life2Short4Nonsense I wondered if there was a back story. You honestly shouldn't worry – if you have children after being estranged from your parents for years, no court is going to grant them access because there is no existing relationship. Grandparents who might be successful go through the courts – I actually don't imagine many are – are the ones who were involved in their GDC's lives but then contact stopped.

Especially if the dcs have a good relationship with the grandparents. There should be attempts to maintainit.
Also in the case where one of the dcs parents has died. The grandparents lose their dc and sometimes access to the grand children.

@Life2Short4Nonsense if you don’t see them anymore then I would think it’s highly unlikely they would be able to force you to let them see your children.

Has this thread come about because of Reform's proposed grandparents rights of access proposal?

Another reason to read their policies really, really carefully if you're tempted to vote for them.

My parents tortured us for the fun of it as children. When I had children they tried to take me to court for “grandparents rights" even though we hadn't spoken to them for years.
I can only imagine the “loving" they had in mind for them.
Grandparents aren't automatically good or safe or loving or reasonable just because they are grandparents.
It is ABSOLUTELY up to me to deny my children their “family."

It's absolutely good enough reason. If I don't get along with my parents because I dislike them intensely, why on earth would I want them around my DC? I'm confident the law would be on my side too, because the grandparents would have to prove that the DC are suffering because of lack of contact. But how would they know if they have no relationship with them?

Good for you. Presumably they were given short shrift by the courts?

I am in my forties now. But it's only been a couple a years since I have cut all contact. I don't want children for many reasons, but if I'd had them they would have had some contact with my parents before I decided that nothing was ever going to change and I needed to take charge of my own happiness.

Surely it depends on the why?

I've voted YABU but based on there being no tangible reason or break-up of the childs parent ie, the paternal grandparents being shut out due to the relationship breakdown. I'd wager the latter happens a lot & it's probably heartbreaking for the grandparents.

If there is toxicity or unresolved history/risk then of course the parents decide.

Incidentally my PILs did see a solicitor to look into the process of applying for contact with DN. This was a child they looked after 2 weekends a month (on BILs weekends, he was around a bit, before he suddenly moved abroad without telling anyone, but this continued monthly after he left before her mother suddenly stopped it) Despite this level of contact, they were told they were unlikely to be successful.
Thankfully after a year the mother restarted contact. But ultimately it was her choice.

BILs abandonment of DN nearly broke FIL... he couldn't believe his own son could be so uncaring.

It should 100% be up to the parents.

A lot of people don't even realise things about their childhood until their child hits an age where something happened, and that's when they realised how fucked up things are.

I certainly didn't.

My mother sent a solicitors letter threatening me with court as I didn't let her see my dc, and basically said that she knows I say that she was abusive and allowed my stepdad to abuse me, but I couldn't prove anything so it's would be in my interests to allow access rather than drag it through court.

So I moved as far as I could, no way was I letting her get her hands on my kids, and I haven't heard anything since.

No way am I allowing her to manipulate and abuse my kids as she did with me. And I have 4 daughters and she made it abundantly clear that she doesn't value girls at all.

Very few people are cutting off their family without very good reason.

I mean it totally is up to the parents. Whether morally it's the right thing to do in each case is another story, but it's up to the parents.

My parents were alcoholics so we kept kids contact with them to bare minimum. However my neighbour had a tiny granddaughter who's dad was in prison and mum was a junkie who paid for her drugs with sex. Granny went for and was awarded custody of the little girl. Every family is different

Our family courts, both public and private, are completely overwhelmed dealing with useless, dangerous or warring parents. The last thing we need is to create a whole new area of litigation by grandparents, most likely the parents of deadbeat dads. Other than exceptional circumstances, e.g. the children lived with the grandparents for years and the parent suddenly denies access, it should be up to parents who their children spend time with.

I love your first two lines!!! That's exactly it!!!

I have run mediations between grandparents and parents around access to grandchildren. Probably the work I hated most. At the end of the day if parents don’t want contact there will not be contact, I have brokered “agreements” that I know won’t stick but nobody wanted to go to Court. Tbh the usual issue is a breakdown in relations between a daughter (parent) and her mum and what they really needed was family therapy, not mediation. I think the children would have benefited from some contact with their grandparents in most cases I saw (no safety concerns) and where I live the children have a legal right to that relationship so their parents are actually denying them that right because of their own issues. It’s easy to dodge it until the grandparents give up though or the kids get too old.

I'm a resident parent, my parents live 10 doors away, DD saw them everyday as they did the school run for me at Nursery and Primary and she still sees them several times a week.

Her DDad on the other hand she sees one day a week, it has always been that way and lives 45 miles away. She arranges her time with him and has done since she was 12.

If something were to happen to me (and DD has already told me she just wouldn't tell her dad and carry on as normal) I would hope my parents would be able to continue having access to her. It's less of an issue now she's in her mid teens as she can travel and phone them independently but if something had happened whilst she was at Primary where they were massively involved in her life then I would want there to be scope for them to have persued contact and that was written in my will - whether it would have been listened to I don't think so.

If parents are both alive and the (normally) male partner is isolating the mother in an abusive relationship Id hope that grandparents would be able to have scope to maintaining the relationship with the grandchildren although this would be a very delicate situation.

Where both parents are alive and don't want their parents to have access due to toxic environments and being nosey contact then parents should be able to say "No!" or perhaps only very supervised access - however this relays in funding and infrastructure and how do you tell one group from another?