Seniors demands for grandparents rights could spell big political headaches

Who gets the final say over who can see your child?At a Florida campaign event last week, Republican Rep.Byron Donalds was confronted by a weeping grandmother who asked him to intervene so she could get access to her grandson.The woman said she hadn’t seen the child since Aug.

7 — not quite a two-month span — and begged Donalds, who’s running to become the Sunshine State’s next governor, to uphold “grandparents’ rights” if he wins.The video went viral, driven in part by the sad trend of family estrangement, often over political disagreements.In the last decade or so, more and more adults seem to be cutting off their parents, “going no contact” on the advice of therapists, friends or social-media kibitzers.A major survey this spring found that 38% of the adult Americans polled had deliberately shunned a friend or family member in the last year.That’s heartbreaking and awful: Families shouldn’t let political opinions poison otherwise healthy relationships.But asking the government to step in and solve that problem is a dangerous remedy.And despite the assumptions of many commenters, politics had nothing to do with the plight of the grandmother pleading for Donalds’ help.The woman blamed “pettiness” for her daughter’s choice to keep her grandchild from her: “I refused to babysit, because I had plans,” she explained tearfully.Then came a kicker that should set off every parent’s alarm bells: The woman said she was working with her representative in Congress, Republican Randy Fine, “to see if we could do a federal law so it could be nationwide.”(It’s unclear if this is true; messages to Fine’s office this this week requesting confirmation went unanswered.)The crying woman pulled at the heartstrings, and Donalds promised to “look into” the issue.For a politician on the stump — especially one running in a state full of grandparents — he did the right thing by empathizing with the sad grandma and then moving on.Others ...