If a parent has gone into a residential program for drug or alcohol abuse, are parenting rights transferred to the grandparents?

You could do something called a standby guardianship, which gives guardianship to whomever the grandparent is until the mother or father can come out of it. You can enter an order where the parties are in agreement that the grandparents will have the kids until further order of court. There’s a whole myriad of different things that you can do. But if both parents were declared unfit by the court, there’d have to be an adoption.

With 30 years of experience in family law, Laura M. Urbik Kern is a certified mediator and family lawyer who concentrates on dissolution, family and juvenile law, child support, and complex domestic relations cases.