A few years ago attorney Nancy Burton and her husband, New York Times correspondent William Honan, decided that if her parents wanted to visit their grandchildren Bradley, 16, Dan, 14, and Edith, 10, they could do so only in the Burton-Honan house. “We never said they couldn’t visit,” says Nancy. “We gave them opportunities. [But] we had to draw the line because they were doing things that weren’t healthy.” She charges that her parents made disparaging remarks about her in front of the children during their visits alone, and that they once kept them for an overnight visit and lied about their whereabouts. Her parents, Milton and June Burton, declined to discuss Nancy’s allegations. “It’s a very sad situation because it’s a very personal situation,” says Milton.
The Burtons and Honans live in Connecticut, one of 12 states that now permit grandparents to petition the court for visitation rights without prerequisites such as the death or divorce of a parent. In April 1990, Milton and June petitioned for unsupervised visits. They want to take the kids to the movies, to restaurants, to have them stay overnight-things they do with their four other grandchildren, Milton says. “That is what we consider grandparents’ rights. Not this stilted idea of going to my daughter’s house while she sits there and listens to everything.” Now the ugly conflict has escalated into five suits involving several lawyers-including one the court appointed for the children. (The youngsters fired him and hired their mother, which the original lawyer says is illegal.) The grand-children have had nightmares and say they don’t want to be with the Burtons, who haven’t seen them for two years. Milton says the youngsters may have been brainwashed. Nancy says her parents are “trying to exert control the same way they were many years ago when I was growing up.” But the Burtons’ attorney, Joseph Dimyan, says his clients, both in their 70s, are not trying to “interfere with an intact family. Before they die they just want to know they’ve done everything they can to see their grandchildren.” The importance and benefits of skip-generation relationships are well documented. Because of increased life expectancy, there are more grandparents in the United States than ever before. With 1 million children’s families torn apart by divorce each year, however, relationships are often strained or broken. An estranged husband or wife may keep children away from grandparents as a way of punishing the spouse. Illegitimate children who are abandoned by one parent may never get to know both sets of grandparents. Since 1965, a crazy quilt of statutes has given grandparents the right to petition for some visitation rights, but legislation varies widely from state to state. And if grandparents win their case in, for instance, Connecticut, they have to start over again if their grandchildren move to New York.
Grandparents’ support groups are popping up all across the country. Some are for people who are raising their grandchildren; others, including the nation’s largest, Grandparents Rights Organization (GRO), are concerned primarily with securing visitation rights. In 1978, Birmingham, Mich., attorney Richard S. Victor took on the case of a woman who had been denied visitation rights after her daughter died and her son-in-law remarried. Appearing on a national television show in 1984, he discussed some of the “grandparents” cases he had since handled. The public response was so great that he founded GRO, which now receives 100 calls a day from grandparents around the country. “They all want to know where they can go for help and what their rights are,” he says. “Grandparents offer children … unconditional love, which every child should have the right to. If death takes that right away then it is a tragedy. But when family bickering denies the child that experience then it’s a shame.” Victor helped William and Nadine Perrydore win visitation rights to their twin granddaughters, who moved with their mother to another state after their parents split up. The 8-year-olds now spend some holidays and five weeks in summer with their grandparents. GRO, says William, advises grandparents of “rights they didn’t know they ever had.”
Despite the emotional and financial costs, grandparents should go to court if it’s the only way to resolve the conflict, says Dr. Arthur Kornhaber, a Lake Placid, N.Y., psychiatrist and president of the Foundation for Grandparenting. “Many times grandparents have been legislated out of existence because of temporary problems,” he says. Of course, no psychiatrist would advocate grandparents’ rights over those of a child who has been subjected to physical or verbal abuse by a grandparent. But in almost every case, Kornhaber says, it is in the best interest of the child to visit with grandparents. “It’s a deep spiritual bond,” he says, “because one is coming into life and the other is going out.”
Most people, including Victor and Kornhaber, view court as a last resort and recommend that families go to professional, third-party mediators. Even the American Bar Association, whose Commission on Legal Problems of the Elderly has worked on the visitation-rights issue, advocates mediation. The ABA is urging legislatures “to enumerate specific factors for courts to consider in determining whether grandparent visitation is in a child’s best interest.” What is urgently needed is some sort of uniform state law-and it may happen. When Rep. Thomas Downey chaired a grandparents’ rights hearing in October, h reported a “positive sign,” that the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws had indicated that it intends to look into the problem. Like many activist groups, the grandparents movement is fragmented and working at a grassroots level; they’re not organized nationally. Older Americans have banded together to exercise enormous political clout in areas affecting their financial and physical wellbeing. Soon, they may do it again, not for the heart but from it.
