When We Terminate Parental Rights, Must We Also Terminate Parental Relationships?

When We Terminate Parental Rights, Must We Also Terminate Parental Relationships?

When we terminate parental rights, must we also terminate parental relationships?   A few weeks back, a brave grandmother raised that profound question in a hearing in which I was serving as her grandchild’s lawyer.

The issue arose during a court hearing just a few days after the trial court had terminated the rights of the child’s parents.  Both parents suffered from a long-term addiction to drugs, and neither had engaged in treatment for several years.  Despite these barriers, throughout the case, they regularly visited the child.  Reports from those visits were very positive, with the child “doing well” during them, and appearing to be “bonded” with her parents.  According to the grandmother, with whom the child was living, she looked forward to seeing her parents every week.  They just weren’t capable of caring for their daughter.

Yet, when the grandmother raised the issue of continued contact in court, the system’s knee-jerk response was to prohibit it.  How could anyone possibly think it was a good idea for a child to have visits with parents whose rights had just been terminated?  Wouldn’t being around “unfit” parents be a bad influence on the child?  The best solution must be to help the child forget her parents, right?

Yet this attitude defies years of research, which demonstrates that children benefit from having parents involved in their lives, in whatever ways possible.  In other words, just because a parent cannot care for a child, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t aspects of the parent-child relationship worth preserving.  So if a parent can visit with the child, great.  If a parent is able to call on birthdays, awesome.  If a parent can send letters while in jail, wonderful.  We must move away from our binary, zero-sum approach, in which we view parent-child relationships as an all or nothing proposition:  if a parent can’t care for a child full-time, then completely eliminate all contact.  Forever.

States are slowly recognizing that children don’t simply forget their birth parents and that there are many circumstances in which continued contact might be beneficial. A little over half of all states have provisions that explicitly allow for post-adoption contact between birth parents and children.  In others, statutes are silent, leaving those decisions to the discretion of agencies, courts, and adoptive parents.  But regardless of the differences in state laws, we must all change our thinking to allow for the possibility that it might be good for children to continue seeing, speaking with, and communicating with their parents even after a court declares their parents to be unfit to care for them. 

In my case, after the grandmother raised the issue, the court very reluctantly granted her request, leaving it in her discretion on whether to allow visits.  As for me, I learned an important lesson (it only took me 17 years of child welfare work to do so).  When I represent children and parents in the future, I must remember that terminating parental rights need not mean that we must also terminate the parent-child relationship.  I have a courageous grandmother to thank for this instruction.