Grandparent Rights & Responsibilities. Are you worried about how a divorce, separation, or death of your parents will interfere with your relationship with your grandchildren?
These life-changing changes in a family can affect grandparent relationships, especially when the living parent or guardian tries to limit your time together.
How can the grandparent visit order be enforced?
What can be done?
how can grandparents get visitation rights
The grandfather requesting the visit has the duty to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate his legal right to court-ordered time and that the proposed visit is in the best interest of the child, taking into account health, safety and well-being.
How to Get Grandparents’ Rights
Once you have established a legal basis for requesting a visit, you must demonstrate that spending time with you is in the best interest of your grandchild, taking into account: the child’s age, the wishes of the child, if he or she is old enough to express preferences, the distance between your child’s home and your preferred place of visit propose to do so, the mental and physical health of everyone involved, including the child, their parents, and anyone else who may have applied for visit or custody, your past and present relationships with the child and parents, and / or your parenting skills and attitudes towards parents.
The court will assign a lawyer to represent the interests of the child who is specially trained to convey his wishes or speak in his best interest.
Some of the strategies custodial parents use to avoid visits from grandparents:
- Refuse to answer their calls or to respond to texts or emails.
- Changed their phone numbers without notifying the grandparents.
- They weren’t home when the grandparents arrived.
- Said that the grandson was sick.
- Claim a scheduling conflict.
- Said that the grandson did not want to see his grandparents.
- Moved without notifying their grandparents.
Illness is a valid reason for canceling visits.
Scheduling conflicts also occur, although in such cases the visit must be rescheduled rather than canceled.
But parents who take other steps to avoid visiting their grandparents risk further legal action.
Many grandparents have won the right to see their grandchildren, only so that those in custody ignore the order.
Courts do not reward visits lightly.
Definite contact is judged in the best interest of the child.
Therefore, it is in the Court’s interest to see such visits take place.
Even so, when Grandpa brings the custodial parents back to court, an already expensive and stressful process tends to be more than that.
Consult a lawyer
In such cases, additional evidentiary reading may be required.
Most of the time, it is wise to use an experienced family law attorney attorney, who can help you through this process.
Many things may affect your case.
Furthermore, there are some tensions between Ohio law and the US Supreme Court ruling regarding grandparents’ rights.
If you can afford a local attorney, then you should.
See How to Find a Good Lawyer.
If you can’t afford a lawyer to represent you, consider hiring a lawyer to provide an independent service.
These services include:Preparing documents, Give you legal advice about Grandparent Rights & Responsibilities, Train you through the process.
If you have questions about your right to spend time with your grandchildren, click the link on this blog