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As a grandparent, you might often be called on to help raise or take care of your grandchildren. In the most dramatic and serious of cases, you might even end up taking care of them full-time and need to petition the court to give you full custody rights over their care. This article explains the basics every grandparent ought to know about their custody options and rights in New York, including:
Not everyone realizes it, but grandparents do actually have the right to file for custody of their grandchildren in New York. However, in order to do so you have to meet a much higher standard than parents.
However, grandparents must demonstrate extraordinary or exceptional circumstances to win custody from the parents. While this is always determined on a case-by-case basis, you will have to show at least one of the following:
So, while grandparents do have a right to file for custody, there is a very high barrier to overcome if you wish to take custody away from the child’s parents.
There is no hard and fast rule about what circumstances will allow a parent to obtain custody, as each request is always assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Nevertheless, you will need strong and serious allegations against their parents in order to win custody of a child. Typically, those would include allegations that would be equivalent to neglect or abuse or an actual filing or finding of neglect or abuse in the family court or Administration of Child Services (ACS).
Alternatively, if the parents have basically abandoned the child or children, and they have been living with you since, that might be sufficient.
In the end, since there is no rule, the standard is simply that the evidence is sufficient to convince a judge that it is in the child’s best interest and worth breaking up the immediate family to do so.
Attorney Jeffrey Johnson is a family law attorney based out of Staten Island who has worked with children, parents, and grandparents throughout the five boroughs of New York City. As an experienced member of the Family Court Assigned Counsel Panel and the Family Court Attorney for the Child Panel, his work is a great place to start for grandparents wishing to learn more about their rights or looking for someone to fight for them in family court.
If you want to pursue your grandparent custody or visitation rights to see your grandchild in New York or Staten Island, call Jeffrey Johnson right away to schedule a consultation.
Since there is no cut-and-dry rule for what arguments are required to obtain custody as a grandparent, there is no specific set of evidence needed either. In general, however, you want to gather as much strong evidence as possible if you hope to win over the family court judge.
This evidence can be:
The court will also often schedule an interview with the child, which would be done by the judge or the referee in their chambers with only the child’s attorney and any court personnel present.
Ultimately, it is the extraordinary or exceptional circumstances hurdle that most often keeps grandparents from obtaining custody over their grandchildren. Since it is generally presumed, by law, that children should be with their parents, you will need to show truly extraordinary or exceptional circumstances to justify a transfer of custody.
You will have to prove that the parents are not suitable caretakers by pointing out often painful circumstances, which can include things like drug abuse by the parents, abandonment, medical or educational neglect, or some criminal case going on.
The least difficult cases are often those in which your grandchildren have already been living with you for some time, though these can also be the most painful to lose.
Unfortunately, in the state of New York, grandparents are usually not entitled to an appointed lawyer in family court. This means that you will typically have to hire your own lawyer to handle a custody or visitation case.
In addition to custody cases, grandparents may also sometimes find themselves fighting merely to see their grandchildren at all when the parents decide they want no contact between their children and you. In most of these cases, the parents and grandparents end up settling, or the judge will order some kind of limited contact between the child and their grandparents. But you might have to fight for it.
Unfortunately, grandparents’ visitation rights are much more limited than a parent’s. For example, a parent who does not have custody will often be entitled to every other weekend and a split of the holidays, sometimes with some additional time. That much time is normally not granted to grandparents because both parents typically have the right to spend most of the time with the child.
The most a grandparent will usually be able to get is perhaps one visit a month, which could be a day visit or an overnight visit. In addition, it cannot conflict with, for example, a visitation scheduled for a non-custodial parent, so any grandparent visitation will have to be limited by several constraints and rarely prioritized.
In most of the cases we have handled, we have been able to secure some kind of visitation or at least some kind of contact between the child and their grandparents. However, unless there is some kind of settlement with the parents who agree to more extended visitations, these outcomes tend to be limited to once a month.
Fortunately, when a grandchild does get to see their grandparent again after a long time, and a grandparent is finally able to express the love and care they have for their grandchild again in person, it is a moving and beautiful moment indeed. It more than makes up for the tough battle sometimes needed to get there and is a complete vindication and encouragement of our work as family law attorneys.
For more information on The Custody And Visitation Rights Of Grandparents In New York, a free initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (718) 557-9767 today.
Attorney Jeffrey Johnson is a family law attorney based out of Staten Island who has worked with children, parents, and grandparents throughout the five boroughs of New York City. As an experienced member of the Family Court Assigned Counsel Panel and the Family Court Attorney for the Child Panel, his work is a great place to start for grandparents wishing to learn more about their rights or looking for someone to fight for them in family court.
If you want to pursue your grandparent custody or visitation rights to see your grandchild in New York or Staten Island, call Jeffrey Johnson right away to schedule a consultation.
