The S.C. Supreme Court did well Monday to decree that a child's parents are in charge of his life. If parents bar grandparents from seeing the child, the grandparents now have no legal recourse - a decision that will be hard for grandparents cut off from grandchildren to accept. But it is in keeping with a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision that banned ill-defined grandparents' visitation rights.

In most families, of course, parents welcome grandparents into the lives of their children, and children benefit from knowing their grandparents. But to elevate this process to a legal right, as S.C. law and Family Court custom had done, was wrong.

The best recourse for grandparents estranged from their children - and by extension, their grandchildren - is to try to repair damaged family relationships. Family Court judges and legislators should not have substituted their judgment in such matters for the judgment of competent parents, and the high court was right to recognize this.