Grandparents: What you must know to get custody of your Grandchildren

Many people remember their grandparents - and see grandparents today - as the emotional anchor of their extended families. It seems intuitively logical that grandparents should have the right, legally, to step in and intervene when they see their grandchildren in situations of abuse, neglect and worse. Drug use of adult children is all too frequent, more so now than before the introduction of cheap, easy to obtain methamphetamines and other street drugs.

This situation has reached crisis proportions in almost every city and town in the country - formerly stable and sober young parents becoming unable to care for their children. And young children left without care, nurturing, guidance, structure. And sometimes without adequate nutrition in situations of filth and even actual physical danger to the child. Family violence of one parent or the other adds an explosive element to this powder keg. And astonishingly, even with deplorable filth, drug use, and family violence, Child Protective Services is often unable to act to protect the children. They may even enter the home, look around, see the filth and neglect, and leave the children with the parent in the same situation in which they found them! Sometimes it is astounding. It is almost always insufficient to cause any real change in the long term conditions in which the children must live.

Grandparents sometimes are forced to watch helplessly in anguish as their young grandchildren go through the tragic lack of care and protection in their fragile formative years, knowing that the children are being exposed to family violence, frequent drug use, and exposure to unsafe persons and circumstances. They watch as they see insufficient or non existent medical care, knowing that they could provide it. They observe serious nutritional inadequacies. They see little to non-existent educational support. And untreated physical and mental health or psychiatric conditions that could permanently scar the child’s development and destroy any hope of a future for that child.

Legally, grandparents have a difficult situation when it comes to what actions they can take through the court system to secure the safety and the well being of the grandchildren they love. Many a grandparent has rescued a grandchild from a household where the parents have become drug addicted. Or have fallen off the deep end and are not functioning as mature, reliable, stable parents. But the path to obtaining the legal right to custody of the child is a long and torturous one. If either parent opposes the grandparent's move to take the child out of such a situation, it can become a bitter and expensive fight. If Child Protective Services becomes involved in the struggle - it can become even more difficult for the grandparents to take possession of the children and protect them. Sometimes Child Protective Services takes aggressive action to prevent family members and grandparents from successfully intervening in parents’ terribly destructive behavior and neglect of the children. And even abuse of the children.

This is where a private attorney can help grandparents overcome the very real obstacles of the bureaucratic and legal system that can prevent effective rescue of their grandchildren.

But I can tell you this: in general, the grandmother or grandfather has the best shot at getting past the first hurdle: STANDING. I will explain more about this in our private, confidential conference in my office. Call for an appointment at 817-335-2037.