What Rights Grandparents Have Over Their Grandchildren in Vietnam
In Vietnam, grandparents are often far more than occasional visitors in a child’s life. In many families they share the daily work of raising the children, and in a good number they carry most of it, while the parents work elsewhere in the country or abroad. That role has deep roots in how Vietnamese families are organised, and the law reflects it.
It is worth understanding this before turning to the law itself, because it explains why the answers can differ so sharply from what foreign families expect. A grandparent kept from a grandchild after a divorce, and a grandparent suddenly raising one after a death, are asking very different legal questions, even though both come from the same place: wanting to remain part of a child’s life, or having to step fully into it. Vietnamese law treats the two situations quite differently.
Why the Law Talks About Duty, Not Rights
Vietnamese law does not really frame this as grandparents’ rights at all. Where a Western system might give a grandparent the right to apply for contact when a parent pushes them out, Vietnamese law begins from a different idea altogether: That grandparents and grandchildren owe one another care.
The Law on Marriage and Family puts it as a relationship of mutual obligation. Grandparents, on both sides of the family, have the right and the duty to look after, raise, and educate their grandchildren, and to set an example for them. It is not a grudging, minimal duty either. It reflects how families here have always worked, with the older generation woven into the raising of the young. And the obligation runs back the other way in time: Grandchildren who grow up are expected to care for grandparents who have no children left to lean on. The law is describing something most Vietnamese families would recognise instinctively, long before anyone opened a statute.
This shapes everything that follows. In the law’s eyes a grandparent is not an outsider asking permission to be involved. They already belong to the child’s care. What changes from case to case is how far the law will let them step forward.
Can Grandparents Demand to See a Grandchild?
This is the question we hear most, and it usually comes from a grandparent who has been cut off after a divorce or a falling-out, unable to understand why a child they helped raise is suddenly out of reach. It is a painful position to be in, and the honest answer is often not the one they are hoping for.
While a child’s parents are alive and raising them, the law leaves the decisions about that child, including who the child spends time with, in the parents’ hands. A grandparent cannot usually go to court to force a parent to allow visits, the way a separated parent can ask a court for contact. The standalone grandparent visitation order that exists in some countries simply has no clear equivalent in the Vietnamese system.
That is hard to hear, but it does not mean nothing can be done. It means the door that works is usually the family one, not the courtroom one. Where a relationship has broken down, a calm conversation, sometimes with a lawyer or a mediator quietly helping to lower the temperature, tends to achieve far more than an application the law was never built to grant. Many of these rifts soften with time and a little distance, and preserving the possibility of that is often worth more than a fight that hardens both sides. Knowing this early spares a grandparent a great deal of heartache and expense chasing an order that is not there to be won.
When a Grandparent Becomes the One Who Raises the Child
Everything changes when a child loses the parents who would ordinarily raise them. Here the law does not keep grandparents at a distance. It turns to them.
Where a young grandchild has no parents able to care for them, Vietnamese law looks through the family in a set order to find who should take over. An adult brother or sister of the child comes first, if there is one able to do it. Where there is not, the grandparents, on both sides, become the child’s natural guardians, and the responsibility of raising the grandchild becomes theirs. This is one of the more reassuring features of the system for a grieving family: A grandparent does not have to petition a court for permission to take in an orphaned grandchild. The law already sees them as the natural person to do it.
Both sets of grandparents stand on equal footing here, which is itself a meaningful point in a culture where the paternal and maternal sides do not always assume equal standing. Where more than one of them is willing and able, they are expected to settle between themselves who will take the lead, and the arrangement can rest with one of them or be shared. All of this sits within the wider rules on guardianship of minors, which govern who looks after a child, and the child’s property, once the parents are gone.
When Grandparents Cannot Agree Between Themselves
Loss does not always draw a family together. Sometimes it pulls it apart, and the two sides of a child’s family each become convinced that they are the ones who should raise the child. It is a hard thing to witness: Two sets of grieving grandparents, each certain they are acting out of love, unable to find their way to an agreement between them.
When that happens and no agreement is possible, the decision passes to a court, and the court returns to the principle that anchors every decision about a child in Vietnam: The best interests of the child, not the wishes or the pride of the adults. It looks at what each home can offer, at who can genuinely provide the care, at where the child’s roots and routines already lie, and, if the child is old enough, at what the child themselves wants. It is the same welfare standard that runs through every question of child custody, applied here between the grandparents rather than between parents.
When Parents Are Still There but Struggling
There is a harder situation still, and grandparents raise it with us more often than people might think: The parents are alive, but the grandparents watch a grandchild being neglected, or living with a parent who cannot cope, and they feel they cannot stand by.
Vietnamese law does allow the care of a child to pass to a grandparent, or another relative, where that genuinely serves the child’s best interests. But it sets the bar high, and deliberately so. The law begins from the belief that a child belongs with their parents, and it will not move a child away from living parents on anything less than real evidence that staying is against the child’s interests. A grandparent who fears a grandchild is truly at risk is not powerless, and concerns of that kind deserve to be taken seriously and looked at properly. But this is delicate ground, decided on evidence and on the child’s welfare rather than on how strongly the grandparents feel, and it is very different from simply disapproving of how a son or daughter is bringing up a child. It calls for careful, honest advice before anything else.
What Happens to Inheritance Between Grandparents and Grandchildren
Because these questions so often arrive alongside a death in the family, it helps to understand where grandparents and grandchildren stand on inheritance as well.
Under Vietnam’s rules of intestate succession, which apply when someone dies without a will, grandparents and grandchildren both sit within the ordered ranks of heirs. They fall in the second rank, which is reached when there is no one in the first, no surviving spouse, children, or parents of the person who died. So a grandchild can inherit from a grandparent, and a grandparent from a grandchild, in the right circumstances. There is also a humane provision that lets a grandchild step into the place of a parent who died before the grandparent, so that a child is not quietly written out of a family’s inheritance simply because the generation above them is gone. These questions belong to the inheritance rules rather than the rules on care, but for many families the two land on the table at the same difficult moment.
When the Family Is Spread Across Borders
For families living across two countries, and there are many, with grandparents in Vietnam and grandchildren abroad, or the reverse, these questions gain another layer of difficulty.
A grandmother in Hanoi hoping to bring up a grandchild who lives overseas, or a grandparent abroad afraid of losing touch with a child in Vietnam, is no longer dealing with Vietnamese family law alone. Nationality, residence, visas, and sometimes the family law of a second country all start to bear on the same question at once. Whether a grandparent overseas could take a grandchild in, how a guardianship recognised here would be viewed in another country, how a child might travel or settle, these do not sit neatly inside any single rulebook. They are among the harder problems we are asked to untangle, precisely because the answer has to be assembled from more than one body of law.
Where This Leaves You
Much of what shapes a grandparent’s position comes down to circumstance: Whether the parents are living, whether the family can agree, whether more than one country is involved. Two grandparents in outwardly similar situations can find the law treats them quite differently, which is why general answers only go so far here.
If you are facing one of these situations, whether you are preparing to raise a grandchild who has lost their parents, hoping to keep a relationship alive after a family has come apart, or worried for a child’s safety, it is worth understanding clearly where you actually stand before deciding what to do. The team at Family Lawyers Vietnam can talk it through with you privately, and can be reached at [email protected].
