How much time with grandparents?

[LastingLight]

How much time do your dc's spend with their grandparents? How far away from you do the grandparents stay? We're having issues with (adopted) dd's biological grandparents demanding what we feel is excessive visits. They live a 2 hour plane ride away.

DD goes to my parent's most Friday afternoons. Hoping for overnight stays from time to time when she's bigger. MIL lives a couple of hour's drive away, and visits for an afternoon about once every six weeks. FIL lives abroad and has only met her twice.

Lastinglight it sounds really messy but in the end they are blood relatives and they had more right than DH to bring up the child. They must have had her best interests at heart because they supported him initially. Of course I would not condone the undermining behaviour that has gone on in order to try to win their case but they must have been desperate. I hope you can be amicable for the dcs sake.

My db died leaving his son being brought up by his partner. I agreed at the time but I am now left with a huge chunk out of my family as she won't let me see dneph, doesn't think it's important and is setting me up as the evil aunt. The BM is seriously mentally ill and unlikely to regain residence now so I have very little opportunity for access. It's very sad that following the death of db my family has been torn apart further.

People are bloody weird sometimes.

LL, all sympathies to you. I'm not sure how helpful it is to you to get a long list of other people's family arrangements, since yours are so specific. The key question here is what does your daughter need rather than what her grandparents want, and their choice to move away does not entitle them to ride coach and horses through your family life. As your dd moves into her teens she may come to resent this too, so I think there is a potential hook here about flexing access arrangements in order to keep them sustainable.

I really think you should get some specialist advice to help you resolve this without laying waste to already fragile relationships. Have ypu tried BAAF? You might also want to post on the adoption board.

Horse, I am very sympathetic to you also, but I strongly disagree that the grandparents have more 'right' to this child and it is hugely unhelpful to say so.

Sorry if you don't want to hear the truth, but there is no other measure of right of access. It would be impossible to base it on who is a better carer as that is subjective.

(Visitng here from the adopters board) Wow

I am amazed at the initial court order. That is a lot of contact.

My parents live around 90 minutes away. We see them maybe once every couple of months on average.

The BGPs chose to move away. When I read your original post I thought to myself one weekend, twice a year, staying in a B&B nearby. Because that would be more 'normal' I think in adoption cases. However this is not a 'normal' situation as you are neither non-related nor kinship caring.

The bottom line to me is that legally you are the parents now, if you don't think the amount of contact is in your childs best interests you should be able to change it. Can you somehow compromise with using skpye for day to day contact but reduce the face 2 face?

My DCs see once set of GPs very regularly, have dinner there at least once a week, probably sleepover 3-4 times a year and often go away with them for a short holiday, so the contact arrangements you have don't necessarily seem that far fetched to me. However, these GPs are lovely and supportive to us as parents and to the children and bring nothing but richness in into the DCs lives. They introduce them to knowledge and experiences that they wouldn't get from us as parents alone. It's an extended family arrangement exactly as it should be and it brings joy to all involved.

However their other GPs are far more like the GPs you describe and they don't see them at all, ever.

Legally, there is no right of access to a child based on biology. It is the CHILD who has rights to her family relationships and her residency would have been set with her dad because he was already raising her and doing a good enough job of it. Of course it is important to preserve the relationship with the grandparents, but the distance between them does make a difference. This girl is entitled to a relationship with her gps AND holidays with her parents AND the freedom to do holiday activities AND normal family life. All must be accommodated and so gps will have to compromise.

they are blood relatives and they had more right than DH to bring up the child

How on earth is that observation helpful to the OP or even relevant to her question?

she came down for 6 days in each of the April and September week-long holidays. This meant that dd spent virtually the whole holiday in granny's company and didn't see friends and other family members

While there is nothing wrong with 6 day visits, I don't think your DD should routinely have her holidays monopolised by her bio grandparents like this. As she gets older, having holiday time for friends and activities is going to get more important, and in effect all grandparents and family members have to give up time with DD for that to happen, bio grandparents should not be excluded.

The contact order sounds generous. Given your concerns, I would not offer any more than that, nor any more than 5 night sleepovers (as a maximum for now).

I was referring to the post where OP mentioned that the gps supported dh adopting the child but then changed their mind. I was trying to explain that she is quite lucky to be in loco parentis as it is, as they would have got PR for the child if it wasn't for OP's dh making his case and the original decision. Neither of them are blood related to the child.

I'm not sure how being adopted makes a difference - whether it means there is a clean slate and the child is treated as though there are no parents or grandparents?

The difference adoption makes is that, in this case, it has meant gps have been given legal rights to see the child. In bio families, gps usually have no rights and parents can and sometimes do choose to cut them out altogether

Hardly any contact with the GPs here, but that's their choice

Anyway........ surely if they decided they were moving so far away, they must have realised it would impact on contact? They do sound as if they are being unreasonable.

That makes sense to me Devora. In this particular case there is a need for a tie to connect the dcs to the gps and that has been written into some kind of agreement.

I wonder if that means I have a right to see my nephew? Probably not :(

With mine? 0 (haven't seen them since childhood). With the ILs, they go round once a week after school and that is more than fine. In the holidays, they spend a few days a week there. Around the DC's birthdays or whatever, they will go out on a trip. Sometimes, if the ILs spot a trip or an interesting place they want to take the DC, or vice versa, then they will go, which hapens abut once every few months.

Thanks so much to everybody who replied. We are not in the UK so don't have the resources that adoptive parents there seem to have. I know that I cannot compare our situation with "ordinary" families, I was just trying to get a feeling for what is seen as "normal" ito grandparent contact. We have tried Skype but somehow it didn't take off. DD does have phone and email contact with the GPs. We now have to wait and see what the mediator says.

We assume that as DD gets older she will lose interest in spending so much time with the BGPs and start to see them for who they really are.