Grandparents rights to visitation with children

Many state legislatures have passed laws giving grandparents the right to take legal action to gain visitation with grandchildren. The idea behind such laws is to maintain the channels of communication between the grandparents and the children in the event of a divorce, death or other circumstances that break up families.

In 2000, in the landmark case of Troxel v. Granville, the United States Supreme Court placed limits on the grandparent visitation laws. The Troxel ruling stemmed from a case in the state of Washington. A man and woman had two daughters together, but had never married. The man subsequently committed suicide, and the woman eventually married another man and started a new family. The dead man’s parents wanted to continue to have contact with their son’s children, and approached the mother about setting up visits. The mother agreed, and proposed a visitation schedule. The grandparents and other relatives of the dead man wanted more time with the children than the mother was offering, and filed suit under Washington’s grandparent visitation law.

In its ruling, the Washington Court of Appeals held that the grandparents did not even have "standing," the legal term for the right to file suit in the first place. The appeals court read the state law strictly to require that before grandparents could seek visitation, there had to already be a custody petition pending, which was not the case. Reasoning further, the judges held that allowing the grandparents to intervene would amount to unconstitutional "state interference with parents’ fundamental liberty interest in the care, custody and management of their children."

On yet another level of appeal, the supreme court of the state of Washington affirmed, or agreed with, the appeals court’s decision. In doing so, however, the state’s highest court rejected the underlying reasoning of the appeals court. The Washington Supreme Court justices felt that there need not be a custody case pending before grandparents could pursue visitation. Justices felt, however, that the state law was too broad in that it allowed "any person" to attempt to obtain visitation with children. That, the court ruled, interfered with parents’ fundamental right to make decisions for their children. Furthermore, the court held that the standard for seeking visits was too low, in not requiring those pursuing visitation to first show that children would be harmed if parents declined to cooperate.

It was the grandparents’ appeal of this ruling that brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Writing the opinion of the Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reviewed the reasoning behind the grandparents’ rights laws. She noted that demographic changes in the country, including the high numbers of single-parent households, have led to increased parental reliance on people outside the nuclear family, including grandparents. O’Connor went on, however, to explore the Court’s long history of resistance to interference with the ability of parents to make decisions for their minor children. As long ago as 1923, O’Connor explained, the high court concluded that the Constitution protected the right of parents to "establish a home and bring up their children." Similarly, she pointed to a 1944 ruling in which the Court found that "the care, custody and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder."

In the end, Justice O’Connor and the Court concluded that a parent who provides adequate care for her children must be able to decide with whom her children will associate. To leave such decisions up to a judge, in the view of the Supreme Court, would conflict with a parent’s basic constitutional rights.