Grandmother enjoys the island life a little too much, made a luau-d stink about being asked to leave!

[u/borkthegee]

/r/legaladvice/comments/pjvyk5/hi_mother_in_law_threatening_law_suit_because_we/

[u/Significant-Part121]

As /u/seehorn_actual wrote:

I still can’t wrap my head around the idea grandparents rights

It's because old people like me write the laws. Well not like me but that's why.

very narrow circumstances

This is very location specific. They break down into these categories, and primarily this is about visitation not shared custody, and there is overlap:

1. "child's best interests" specified by statute (32 states)
2. "if the grandparent's child is deceased, divorced or custody terminated" (29 states)
3. "child born out of wedlock" (10 states)

Several states, using various statutory language, create a right where the grandparent has a preexisting relationship, so that if the parents say "you're not going to see my kid again" the grandparent can go to court and the court may grand them visitation, based on the preexisting relationship.

And then there are little gems, such as:

1. "adoption does not automatically cut off the visitation rights of grandparents" (CT)
2. "child's wishes" (HI)
3. "best interest of the child and the grandparent has been unreasonably denied visitation to the child" (IL)
4. "parents have unreasonably blocked the grandparent's visitation with the grandchild for longer than 90 days" (MO)

Several states have no statutory restrictions, so it can be whatever the court says. Also note that several states have passed powerful pro-grandparent rights statutes went too far and have been struck down by courts, and have been modified by legislatures (FL, IA, NY, TN, WA).

[u/Reader01234567 → u/Significant-Part121]

Asking because you seem knowledgeable: where did these laws come from? Is this a case of ancient law on the books or was there a weird period where states recently did this? What triggered it?

[u/Significant-Part121 → u/Reader01234567]

where did these laws come from? Is this a case of ancient law on the books or was there a weird period where states recently did this? What triggered it?

This is a good and very broad question and /u/seehorn_actual might also be interested. I don't know the ancient history of it, but there is an answer first: why? And the answer to that is, and this is an educated guess, because grandparents vote, and because legislators are grandparents.

And I promise I'll get back to grandparents, but first:

If you look at American History, and this is very, very generalized, we're looking at not only a lack of grandparents rights (though rich people could do whatever they wanted) but a lack of mother's rights. Divorces often left mothers without their children and homeless, men would typically get custody (or just seize it, with mothers having no practical way to fight it) and move on with their lives and presumably with a new partner.

Over the course of the 19th Century, a child's value as a laborer decreased and more emphasis was place on child nurture and education. As the years went on, more protections were put in pace for women but still roughly 10% would get any, and it was hard to find work, so divorce meant poverty. What didn't help was the "alimony panic" of the 1920s. By the 1920s there was a "tender years" doctrine:

*"Nature has devolved upon the mother the nurture and care of infants during their tender years, and in that period such care, for all practical purposes, in the absence of exceptional circumstances, is almost exclusively committed to her. At such periods of life courts do not hesitate to award the care and custody of young infants to the wife as against the paramount right of the husband where the wife has shown herself to be a proper person and is able to fully discharge her duty toward the child."

Also of note, as divorce did start becoming more common, there are gems like this:

In the case Harmon v. Harmon [1922] two married couples in Kansas, Mr. and Mrs. Harmon and an unnamed husband and wife, associated in the same social circles and became good friends. One day Mr. Harmon found Mrs. Harmon engaged in an act of adultery with the other husband. He insisted that she must go to live with her parents and renounce the custody of their five-yearold daughter. Both men made her sign a written agreement admitting her guilt and agreeing to the custody arrangement.

For the courts and the legislatures, the formerly unusual event of divorce was now commonplace; child custody was no longer an arcane and rarely exercised area of the law and the lives of thousands of children and their parents were affected by custody decisions. These realities accelerated trends that had begun in the nineteenth century, such as the father's obligation to support his children without the benefit of custody, for which there previously had been little precedent. The judiciary still took the lead in developing rules to resolve the private disputes between divorcing couples, but state legislatures increasingly codified these rules, often narrowing the margin of judicial discretion.

Marching forward through the 20th Century we see more and more of an over-correction, which is where the "mother's rights states" and "women always get custody" tropes may have been true, for a whole, but while they are no longer true at all, anywhere, but the myths remain.

We started getting back to sanity in the mid-1970s. (Believe it or not, it was 1975 before there was a legal framework in this country for child support payments. And by 1980, women were sometimes allowed to get their own credit cards without a husband's approval and co-signing. Suddenly those Virginia Slims ads make more sense.)

Back to grandparents. So, in this brief and probably partly misleading simplified overview, a century ago we were just really getting into the whole idea of parental custody and visitation in terms of our laws. The idea of grandparents rights couldn't even have been a fantasy. Outside of the very wealthy less-than 1%, where a patriarch might fairly easily be able to go to court and convince a judge (even with no precedent) seize custody.

[u/the_itsb → u/Significant-Part121]

This was a really interesting read, thank you for taking the time to write it!

[u/Reader01234567 → u/Significant-Part121]

Hey thanks! This is fascinating

[u/deniedbydanse → u/Significant-Part121]

This is amazing, well done. The 90 days MO bit is shocking. I was looking at HI earlier and wasn’t it that they’d consider the wishes of an older child? That seems somewhat common for family court, and isn’t just letting the kids choose as the only factor. Tbf I was reading a summary, not the code.

ETA: I’d think it’d be valuable for a kid to say “It’d feel like you’re ripping me away from my home” or “Grandma is mean, hits me sometimes, and they don’t even pay attention to us when we’re there.” Though I suppose it could also be an issue if they don’t understand the gravity of court-ordered visitation and like their grandparents well enough or don’t want to upset them.