Sen. Steele has introduced SB 3 which would allow great-grandparents to seek visitation of a child on the same basis as grandparents. It would allow both to seek visitation if they’ve had meaningful contact with the child in the past but, due to estrangement with the child’s parent, the grandparent’s or great-grandparent’s contact has been cut off.
I haven’t followed the issue of grandparent visitation, and I know there has been a fair amount of activity along those lines. But my general sense is that if a parent-child relationship is basically functional, then the parent should be able to make the determination about how much or how little visitation the grandparent has. I can certainly see where this might suck for the grandparent, but in most cases I don’t see where this adversity for the grandparent really justifies engaging the wheels of the legal machinery which mostly doesn’t grind fine enough to deal with this sort of thing very well.
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