Grandparents Who Fight for Custody Risk It All

In the chaotic world of casual childbearing, intensified by courts that try to helpby reunifying troubled children with their troubled parents, it’s easy to see why grandparents sometimes think they are the only ones who care.

Over the past two years, an increasing number of grandparents--now five to 10 a day--have been calling the Childhelp IOF Foresters National Child Abuse Hotline, based in Los Angeles, said Director Sue Meier.

Meier said grandparents know their own children and notice problems more quickly than outsiders. They also often feel they have nowhere else to turn.

One of them is a 47-year-old grandmother we’ll call “Sally.”

Sally said her son has a drug problem. His girlfriend, she said, “has a lot of child abuse in the family.”

Their school-age daughter has had recurring vaginal infections for two years.

On weekends, when Sally would baby-sit, she said the child would “sit in the bathtub and tell me stories you wouldn’t believe.” She named names on the mother’s side of the family. Nothing, however, would ever be proven.

After consulting her son, Sally called the hot line (800-4-A-CHILD) and eventually the officials at the Department of Children’s Services. It became what she called “a very sticky situation.”

The parents refused to let Sally see the child. Sally and her husband hired a lawyer. The parents hired a lawyer. Sally received temporary custody, then the parents received custody with the provision they obtain counseling.

At that point, Sally said the girl’s relatives had to pry her fingers off a banister before they could carry her kicking and screaming back to her parents.

Then the parents and their daughter moved hundreds of miles away.

Said crisis counselor John Jones: “Many grandparents would like to say, ‘I will never let this happen to you again.’ Unfortunately, because of our legal system, that can’t be said a lot of the time in earnest.”

Now armed with court-ordered visitation rights, Sally flies back and forth to see her granddaughter regularly and to “monitor the situation.”

She has spent $10,000 to do what she sees as the right thing. She believes she is the only stable influence in her young granddaughter’s life. She wishes the courts would agree.

Often, they do. In 1990, the Census Bureau reported that 3.2 million children younger than 18 were living with grandparents or relatives other than their parents. In California, 750,000 grandparents have legal guardianship of their children, according to the Lakewood support group Grandparents as Parents.

But child-welfare agencies can be skeptical--some say too skeptical--of grandparents. After all, they were the ones who raised the dysfunctional parents in the first place. They might be the obsessive, controlling type.

Indeed, Meier claims that judges, following the federal law requiring them to seek family reunification, will always return a child to its parents “unless a child is literally coming in black and blue or dead.”

To many worried grandparents, the rules make no sense. Hot line counselors often need to inform worried grandparents that cocaine use, for instance, is not considered serious enough to remove a child from his parents.

Counselors advise grandparents to avoid confronting family members because they can accomplish more by remaining connected. For instance, if grandparents obtain written permission from the parents to seek emergency medical help, the grandparents can use that slip to seek a medical evaluation for abuse.

Others say they have been advised by insiders to kowtow to social workers, whose recommendations have a powerful influence in court.

Similarly, Jeff Klein, another crisis counselor, advises grandparents not to introduce themselves to social workers with, “I am a concerned grandparent.” Klein said the caseworker automatically shuts off, assuming it’s just another family power struggle.

Sally has resigned herself to the middle ground. “If I had time to think about it, I’d be in tears 24 hours a day,” she said. “This is a beautiful, perfect human being who has every right to have a beautiful future, and I’m being pulled away from her. The only thing I can do is stand back and let her know she can talk to me. At least talk to me.”

Sally sees light, but it’s at the end of a years-long tunnel. “When (my grandchild) comes of age,” she said, “she can come and stay with me.”