There’s some dispute surrounding last week’s blog regarding the wholesale revision of South Carolina’s grandparent visitation statute. Some commenters contend that grandparents should never be awarded autonomous visitation over a parent’s objection. Others believe that court-ordered visitation should be available to grandparents even when the parents are part of an intact household. As I indicated in that blog, I believe the law strikes a proper balance. This blog is my attempt to explain why.
Grandparent visitation statutes were an intellectual interest of mine from early in my career. In my first case defending a grandparent visitation request, I represented a father who had previously been falsely accused of sexual molesting his daughter by the mother and maternal grandmother. During that case, the grandmother had tried to surreptitiously remove the child from the country and also tried to undermine his relationship with his daughter. That case was protracted and expensive and ended with the mother having only supervised visitation and a fugitive from the state. It also left my client deeply in debt and with a justifiable fear of the grandmother having any relationship with his child
Yet when the grandmother filed a new action for visitation, the family court had no problem overriding my client’s wishes and awarding grandmother supervised visitation. This was done at a temporary hearing, solely on affidavits, and with my client having no right to question the maternal grandmother. Further, there was no guardian to represent the child’s best interests. The family court was not required to justify its decision. The judge simply felt that a child should have time with a grandparent.
Both my client and I found the ruling officious, absurd and scary. After years of chaos in his divorce litigation, my client endured new chaos until the court realized grandmother’s behavior hadn’t improved and terminated her visitation. This case led me to research the issue of when the family courts should be able to override a fit parent’s decision making and led to my first lecture before the family court bench. In the years since, I have not stopped thinking about the issue of when and why the family court should award grandparents visitation.
Most parents want their own parents to have a relationship with their children, and support the grandparent-grandchild relationship, so grandparents typically don’t need court intervention to have a relationship with their grandchildren. When these parents don’t want their own parents to have a relationship with their children, the court should be extremely cautious before overriding that decision.
I believe the new statute correctly prevents grandparents from seeking court intervention when the child’s parents are part of an intact family unit. Grandparent visitation should best be thought of as an ancillary right of the grandparent’s child [the child’s parent] and should only be awarded when that parent is unable to exercise custody or visitation with the child. Thus, if a mother does not want her own mother to see the child, I believe the court should give that opinion tremendous weight. However, if a mother doesn’t want the paternal grandmother to see the child, the mother’s opinion should be given less weight.
Further, grandparent visitation should only be awarded when the grandparent’s own child is unable to exercise visitation. When a parent is incarcerated, dead, or on active military duty, court-ordered grandparent visitation may be the only method by which a child can maintain or develop a relationship with one-half of his or her family. However, when that parent is available to spend time with the child, grandparents should see the child when their own child has time with the child.
The more people who have the right to claim a child’s time, the greater the opportunity for conflict and tension regarding the child. In fact, the conflict and tension grow exponetionally–rather than arithmetically–as the number of folks laying claim to the child increase. If dad has court-ordered visitation, the court should be very reluctant to award paternal grandparents additional visitation. If there is a concern over father’s ability to exercise his court-ordered visitation [because of geographic distance from the child, military duty or incarceration], the courts should simply give father the right to delegate his visitation time to relatives rather than awarding his relatives autonomous visitation.
Some of the controversy over the grandparent visitation statute may be due to the lack of general awareness that the family court can already award custody or visitation to persons who meets the criteria of a “de facto custodian” as set forth in S.C. Code § 63-15-60. This code defines a “de facto custodian” as:
a person who has been shown by clear and convincing evidence to have been the primary caregiver for and financial supporter of a child who:
(1) has resided with the person for a period of six months or more if the child is under three years of age; or (2) has resided with the person for a period of one year or more if the child is three years of age or older.
Such de facto custodians can be awarded custody or visitation if the family court “finds by clear and convincing evidence that the child’s natural parents are unfit or that other compelling circumstances exist.”
This “de facto custodian” statute allows the family court to grant custody or visitation to persons–including grandparents–who have spent significant time raising the child at issue. This code section could often be applied by relatives who have raised a child when the parents were absent. Thus a grandmother who raised her grandchild while her daughter was incarcerated, serving in the military, or otherwise too preoccupied to raise her own child, can seek court-ordered visitation, or even custody, regardless of whether the mother is now living with or married to the child’s father.
Grandparent visitation should be not invade intact families and should generally not allow a grandparent’s wishes to trump his or her own child’s wishes. When a parent is unable to exercise visitation, application of the new grandparent statute is appropriate; when a parent does not want his or her own parent exercising visitation it is not. For those grandparents who have such a substantial relationship with their grandchildren that they meet the criteria of “de facto custodian,” they have an additional–perhaps stronger–remedy to maintain a relationship with their grandchild.
Given that remedy, the new statute strikes a proper balance between the rights of parents to raise their children without undue government interference and the right of grandparents to obtain court intervention to develop or maintain a relationship with their grandchild. It should also prevent circumstances in which a chaos-creating grandparent gets to override a fit parent’s decision making and in which the family court finds a grandparent too unsafe to exercise unsupervised visitation but still awards autonomous grandparent visitation.
Unless the custodial parent has valid, objective reasons against it, I agree that sometimes grandparents should be able to “step in the shoes of” the non-custodial parent when the non-custodial parent is unavailable, such as military duty, or extended hospice, or the like. I am a bit less persuaded for the case of parental incarceration because something happened somewhere and it could very well be that the grandparents were part of the problem that led to the bad behavior of the incarcerated parent (as an enabler, for example).
However, in cases where the parents have court ordered visitation or even equal time with the child, I do not believe that the parent can delegate his/her time to the grandparents when that parent is working or decides to go out with friends, etc. If the bio parent is available to keep their own child while the other parent is working or going out, then the bio parent should have that right, if he or she chooses.
Further, if the bio parent gets to delegate his/her time with the child to the grandparents over the other parent’s objection, then the grandparents must be made a party to the action so that they are subject to the contempt powers of the court. The bottom line is that grandparents are NOT the parent of the minor child, and their desire to see the child (in lieu of their own child’s visitation) should not trump the bio parent’s wishes except in extremely rare circumstances, in my opinion.
On The “Intact Family” Aspect:
So now that some cases have run under this amended code, how has it actually played-out in practical terms? I ask because a friend of mine is the grandparent whom has been forced out of her grandson’s life via son-in-law personality conflict. She has effectively been exiled into oblivion, and has not seen her grandson in approximately 2-years. Her daughter (child’s mother) is seemingly forced into agreement with her husband. They are an intact family.
My friend is seeking some reasonable visitation accommodation. She has no car and no money, but was forced away by the strong-personality of the son-in-law, and ordered to never contact and never come back.
It is getting easier to get grandparent visitation. Your friend is welcome to contact me if she wants to hire me.
I have been forced out of my 1 year old only blood grandchild life by my daughter in law. My son will sometimes lie to his wife to bring the child to see me but since she was born just about year ago i have seen my blood granddaughter approximately 5 times and they live less than 15 minutes away from me. My Daughter in law has a soon to be 4 year old who is totally being withheld from seeing me yet 2 years ago when she moved to IL where my son and I were living I took care of her child almost daily, did their laundry, and purchased clothing for the child and financed a car for her because her car was repossessed. What rights do I have as a grand parent if they are still an intact family to see my grandchild. We are now living in the state of Wisconsin.
Barb
Hi. Sadly, grandparents will file for visitation just as a tool to hurt the parent. To fight for control. What happens when a grandparent lies about having such a strong relationship with a grandchild? What happens when they lie about the time they spent with them ? It happens. Good parents rights need protected 100 percent.
Well said, I agree wholeheartedly. I am in a situation where my daughters paternal grandmother has proven her relationship is unhealthy and has admitted to the judge that she undermines my authority in front of my child while in her care. For 6 years I have been defending myself in court against this woman whenever she feels the need to make my life difficult. Her own son and I both opposed visitation, her own sister called me and told me, after witnessing her visitation, that it is not in my daughters best interest. The judge still will not listen. Now my child is having severe behavioral issues at home and school, has recently been diagnosed with ODD. The family court will not hear my pleas that this woman is wrecking havoc on my child’s well being! What can I do?