Washington grandparents are fighting for their right to see estranged grandchildren
Jul 15, 2016, 6:39 AM | Updated: Oct 11, 2024, 9:59 am
Lori Paine and her granddaughter, before they were estranged. (Photo courtesy of Lori Paine)
(Photo courtesy of Lori Paine)
Two years ago, Puyallup’s Lori Paine lost contact with her then 3-year-old granddaughter.
“My daughter and I had a falling out,” she said. “It was a money issue. The result was my granddaughter, who I had been taking care of three to four days a week, was abruptly removed from my life. That was pretty devastating.”
So Paine did her research and found there was nothing legally protecting her relationship with her granddaughter.
“Washington state is the only state in the union that does not have a law or statute to protect the grandparent/grandchild relationship,” she said. “This has been going on since the year 2000 with a court case Troxel v. Granville where Washington state lost its law. It was declared unconstitutional.”
So she’s collecting signatures for I-877, an initiative they call “Children Need Grandparents.” It would give grandparents, and any other relative, the ability to go to court and fight for visitation with a child.
She says families sometimes split when there’s a death, divorce or disagreement, and the grandchildren are kept away, whether they like it or not.
“We have a family that lives in Puyallup,” Paine said. “This is a family that had an ongoing loving relationship on both sides, no problems. Involved with the grandchildren for years. Sadly, their daughter was killed in a car accident. Not too long after that, the surviving son-in-law remarried.
“The new person that came into their lives, for some reason some type of insecurity, did not want to deal with the memory of the deceased wife or her family and asked the husband to cut contact with that side of the family. And so he did. It’s been some years now that have gone by. They are grieving and they can’t heal. That’s a really common scenario.”
Paine says their initiative does not take away parental rights and has nothing to do with custody. Just visitation. It also protects children from dangerous situations.
“If there is a history of any legal problems in the grandparent’s past or abuse in the grandparent’s past or if the grandparent resides with someone who has legal problems or abuse in their history, they will not be considered,” she said. “They will not be able to even be seen in court.”
Paine and her daughter have been working things out, and she’s recently been reunited with her granddaughter and a grandson who was born during their estrangement. But she continues to fight for the other grandparents out there.
Initiative 877 needs to collect 350,000 signatures by the end of the year in order to make it onto the ballot.
