Abusing Parents and Children

I talked last week to another parent who is involved in a grandparent access case. If you have followed the issue of restoring parental rights that we have been working on for several years, it is a typical but heartbreaking story.

In fact, I reported about this case and the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling on it recently, and now, as is often the case, this family is back before the court. The father, who is a widower, is being sued because the grandparents disagree with decisions the parents make for the children and, in fact, refused to abide by the directions of the parents in visits with the grandparents. Now the parents face the decision of selling their home to pay for continued litigation.

This is not uncommon; in fact, we are involved in another case in which the courts have removed a daughter from a fit widower father and placed her with the grandparents under “temporary” orders that have been in place for more than two years. The grandparents plan to drag things out until the father can no longer afford to fight.

The same judge involved in this case has a history of abusing fit parents in favor of grandparents, as exemplified by another case in which the Second Court of Appeals of Texas forced him to return a mother’s daughter to her after almost three years of “temporary” orders.

This abuse must be stopped, and that is why we are going to be working very hard in the next legislative session to change this law to protect children and families from such legal abuse.