ABSTRACT
Grandparents’ access and rights can become a serious problem when family conflict occurs or when circumstances mean that parents are not able to care for their children. It would be impossible to cover, in one chapter, the immense variety of laws and policies pertaining to grandparents’ access and rights in countries across the world. Instead we outline the most general legal approaches to grandparents’ entitlements under the law in several Western countries – the UK, USA and Australia. We then describe some of the policies that reflect this and the impact on grandparents. In the third section, we describe programmes developed to assist grandparents functioning in their role – helping them to be better grandparents.
