The Next Parental Rights Battle Is Coming From Inside The Family

At a Byron Donalds campaign stop in Kissimmee, Florida, last week, a grandmother took the microphone to ask the Republican gubernatorial candidate a question about “grandparent rights.” She told Donalds, “I have not seen my grandson since August 7th of this year. And I want to know what can happen to get the fix, because it’s because of pettiness, because I refuse to babysit, because I had plans, and that’s why I’m not seeing my grandson. And so I would like for you to do something, or at least direct me to the right people.”

The right people, she explained, were legislators who could force her grandson’s parents to allow visitation. She went on, “We could do a federal law on this so it’d be nationwide, because grandparents should be able to see their grandchildren.”

A tweet with the exchange went viral with over 8 million views, and Americans across the political spectrum weighed in on a segment of family law few people knew about before this moment. After years of culture-war debates over parental rights, Americans are learning for the first time that grandparent rights exist in the legal code in states across the country.

One such case from Idaho shows how these kinds of laws work in practice. Four years ago, the state Supreme Court ruled on a case brought by Dennis and Linda Nelson, who asked a magistrate judge to award them visitation with their grandchildren after the grandchildren’s parents, Brian and Stephanie Evans, cut off contact in 2017. The grandparents requested, under a visitation law, access to their three granddaughters, which the parents fought through the state’s legal system. The children’s parents asserted that the grandparents had inserted themselves into the Evans family to an “exorbitant” extent and that the grandparents’ behavior violated boundaries the parents tried to set.

The case made it to the state Supreme Court before returning to a lower court where the parents were overruled. The magistrate court ruled for the grandparents, “despite finding the Nelsons had harmed the grandchildren by acting in the way that they had.”

The parents asked for a ruling on the law’s constitutionality, arguing that it “did not serve any compelling state interest and that it allowed fit parents to be hauled into court by overzealous grandparents.” The high court agreed, noting that the case had cost the Evans over $50,000 in legal fees. The Evans were granted the right to decide who could access their children.

In legal filings, one conflict stemmed from a visit in which the parents asked the grandparents to take the children on a simple outing. Instead, the granddaughters were brought to Disneyland and weren’t returned at the agreed-upon time. Frequent violations of the parents’ autonomy led them to decide to set boundaries through estrangement.

Estrangement is having a cultural moment, with commentators noting that the frequency with which children are going “no contact” with their own parents is increasing. A recent Wall Street Journal report explained, “Family estrangement is on the rise, driven by shifting family norms and changing therapy practices. ‘We’re at a cultural tipping point.’”

It’s a troubling phenomenon, and more parents (and now grandparents) may try to resolve the estrangement through legal measures, as the mother at the Byron Donalds rally wants to be able to.

Parents and grandparents should work out their differences, and estrangement should be a last resort.But parents have a fundamental right to direct their children’s moral upbringing. Byron Donalds believes this, or at least he did when he signed the Moms for Liberty Parents Pledge a few months ago. The organization’s motto, “We don’t co-parent with the government,” extends to the government declining to step into a family dispute.

Donalds had an opportunity to say exactly that in Kissimmee. Instead, he directed his staff to get the grandmother’s information and promised to “work with the members of the legislature on this.” The more principled answer would have been considerably less politically comfortable given his elderly base: Parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, and that includes deciding which adults have access to them. That principle doesn’t disappear because the person asking the government to override the parents is a grandparent rather than a progressive school staffer.

Republicans may increasingly find themselves forced to choose between two constituencies they have spent years courting. The GOP has made parental rights a centerpiece of its education and culture-war agenda. But older Americans are also among the party’s most reliable voters and donors, and an increasingly vocal grandparent-rights movement could put those commitments in direct conflict.

Parental rights are easy to defend when the villain is a progressive school board. The harder test comes when enforcing them means telling a crying grandmother, “No.”

By the grandmother’s account, she last saw her grandson on August 7. The Donalds event occurred only about seven weeks later. Yet in that remarkably short span, she had already contacted her member of Congress and asked a candidate for governor to create a federal law that could compel her adult child to give her access to a grandchild.

Perhaps her account is exactly as she presented it: She declined to babysit once because she had plans, and her child retaliated by withholding her grandson. If so, the estrangement sounds cruel and disproportionate. But her own account of the estrangement leads one to wonder whether there is perhaps more to the story.

That uncertainty is precisely why the government shouldn’t presume it knows better than a fit parent. The Idaho case shows how quickly a seemingly sympathetic story about grandparents missing their grandchildren can become something very different, and how much it can cost parents to adjudicate a family dispute in court. Parents should never have to spend tens of thousands of dollars defending their authority over their own children.

Therapists and online culture may encourage people to sever family relationships that could instead be repaired. But repair won’t come from state persuasion.

***

Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six. She podcasts at the Mom Wars and writes for its Substack.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.