Grandparent Rights in Texas

The Texas Family Code offers grandparents one dedicated route to court-ordered visitation with a grandchild over a parent's objection, and the route is built to turn most travelers away. Three sections of subchapter G of chapter 153 do the work: a standing and affidavit rule, a three-part proof requirement, and a cutoff at adoption. Nothing in them rewards optimism, so this guide states the bar the way the statute does.

The statute starts with the parent, not the grandparent

Under section 153.002(a), the child's best interest is always the court's primary concern when conservatorship, possession, or access is decided. Subsections (b) and (c), in the section as amended effective September 1, 2025, then set the frame that governs any contest between a parent and someone who is not one. In such a suit, section 153.002(b) presumes both that a parent acts in the best interest of the parent's child and that the child is best served by being in a parent's care, custody, and control.

A grandparent is a nonparent. The question a Texas court asks is therefore never whether time with a grandmother or grandfather would be good for the child. It is whether a parent's decision to deny that time should be overridden at all, and the code's answer is: only on proof of harm, with the entire burden on the person asking.

Who may file, and the affidavit that screens the suit

Under section 153.432, a biological or adoptive grandparent may request possession of or access to a grandchild in an original suit or in a modification suit brought under chapter 156. The request can be the entire lawsuit: subsection (b) allows a filing whose sole purpose is grandparent access, whether or not anyone is fighting over a managing conservator.

Subsection (c) is the courthouse-door test. The grandparent must execute and attach an affidavit, on knowledge or belief, alleging with supporting facts that denial of possession of or access would significantly impair the grandchild's physical health or emotional well-being. The court is directed to deny the relief and dismiss the suit unless the facts stated in the affidavit, taken as true, would support relief under section 153.433. That makes the affidavit a merits screen applied before any hearing on evidence. A filing that recites love and loss but pleads no concrete facts showing impairment does not survive it.

The three findings section 153.433 requires

Section 153.433(a) permits a court to order reasonable possession or access for a grandparent only when three separate conditions are all satisfied. Each one independently ends cases.

1. At least one parent still holds parental rights

At the time the relief is requested, at least one biological or adoptive parent of the child must not have had parental rights terminated. Once every parent's rights have been terminated, this route is gone, and section 153.434 may bar the filing outright, as described below.

2. Proof that denial would harm the child

This is the element most suits cannot carry. The grandparent must overcome the presumption that the parent is acting in the child's best interest, and the statute fixes both the burden and the showing: the grandparent prevails only "by proving by a preponderance of the evidence that denial of possession of or access to the child" would "significantly impair" the child's "physical health or emotional well-being."

Notice everything that element is not. It is not proof that visits would enrich the child's life, that the grandparent helped raise the child, or that the parent's decision is unfair or unkind. The statute poses a harm question: without court-ordered access, would this child suffer significant impairment, physically or emotionally? Evidence that speaks only to benefit never answers it.

3. The condition of the grandparent's own child

The third element is the one most people have never heard of, and it screens out the most common family configurations. The person suing must be the parent of one of the child's parents, and that son or daughter of the grandparent must, at the time of filing, fit one of four descriptions:

• incarcerated in jail or prison during the three-month period preceding the filing of the petition;
• found by a court to be incompetent;
• dead; or
• without actual or court-ordered possession of or access to the child.

Read the last item closely, because it excludes the situation grandparents ask about most. If the grandparent's own child is alive, competent, not incarcerated during the three-month period preceding the filing, and seeing the grandchild, the element fails, however completely that parent or the other one has shut the grandparent out. The design treats grandparent contact as something that flows through the grandparent's child: while that parent has access of their own, the law expects the family to sort it out privately or not at all.

One procedural echo underlines how seriously the Legislature meant all this. Under section 153.433(b), an order granting grandparent access over a parent's objections must state each of the three findings with specificity in the order itself.

The adoption cutoff

Section 153.434 removes even the right to ask. A grandparent may not request possession or access when two things are both true. First, each biological parent of the grandchild has died, had parental rights terminated, or executed an affidavit of waiver of interest or relinquishment of parental rights under chapter 161 designating the Department of Family and Protective Services, a licensed child-placing agency, or a person other than the child's stepparent as managing conservator. Second, the grandchild has been adopted, or is the subject of a pending adoption suit, by someone other than the child's stepparent.

The stepparent carve-out is the section's only softness. A stepparent adoption does not trigger the cutoff by its terms. Any other adoption, once the parents are gone in one of the listed ways, ends the matter before it can begin.

A wrinkle in the 2025 text

The current statute carries a tension worth naming rather than smoothing over. Section 153.433(a)(2) states its burden as a preponderance of the evidence. Section 153.002(c), as amended in 2025, says a nonparent in a suit against a parent overcomes the parental presumption by clear and convincing evidence, a stiffer standard aimed at a nearly identical impairment finding, and requires any order granting a nonparent relief to state the specific supporting facts. The chapter does not say how the two provisions interact in a grandparent access case. Anyone filing or defending one of these suits should read both sections in their current form on the Legislature's statute site, because the fit between them will be worked out by courts and future sessions, not by summaries like this one.

When custody, not visitation, is the real question

Subchapter G is titled Appointment of Nonparent as Conservator, and some grandparents are not seeking visits at all. They are raising the grandchild already, or believe they need to. Conservatorship is a different suit with different gatekeeping. Who may bring it is a question of standing, and standing for suits affecting the parent-child relationship lives in chapter 102 of the Family Code. The reliable method is to read the current text of chapter 102 on the official statute site and match your facts against each numbered category, rather than assuming a grandparent qualifies. Once inside the suit, section 153.002(c) supplies the burden a nonparent must meet against a parent, and the guide to conservatorship in Texas explains what managing conservatorship actually allocates.

Grandparents already holding a court order stand on firmer ground: an existing order is enforceable and modifiable like any other, and the rest of the Texas family law guides cover those tools. Every section number in this article links to the official text at statutes.capitol.texas.gov, which is the citation rule across our guides to Texas law.