Rush, J.
A child’s relationship with his grandparents is important, and can deserve protection under the Grandparent Visitation Act. But grandparent-visitation orders necessarily impinge, to some degree, on a parent’s constitutionally protected rights. An order granting grandparent visitation must therefore include findings that address four well-settled factors for balancing parents’ rights and the child’s best interests, and must limit the visitation award to an amount that does not substantially infringe on parents’ rights to control the upbringing of their children.
In this case, the trial court’s grandparent-visitation order failed to meet either requirement. To provide the trial court with an opportunity to cure those defects, we remand for new findings and conclusions consistent with this opinion.
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Applying those principles to this case reveals that the trial court’s findings, though proper so far as they go, are incomplete. As discussed above, trial courts must consider all four Troxel principles, as distilled by McCune and made mandatory by K.I. All three members of the Court of Appeals panel recognized that necessity and acknowledged the trial court had made no express findings on at least two of those factors. But the majority believed the findings sufficiently addressed those factors by implication, so that the omission was one of form, not substance. The dissent, by contrast, saw no consideration of the first two factors even implicitly and thus found the order constitutionally defective. We agree with the dissent and find that the trial court’s order was not constitutionally permissible.
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In ordering new findings on the old evidence, it is not our goal to impose a rigid formalism, under which any order that recites enough of Troxel’s “magic words” will be affirmed. Obviously, it will not be enough to merely recite those factors, unless there is also analysis of how the evidence as weighed by the trial court fits within that framework. Conversely, we also do not decide the extent to which a trial court’s findings that do not mention these factors by name might nevertheless sufficiently address them in substance. For today, it is enough to observe that this particular order wholly fails to address the first two factors, and is unclear at best as to its assessment of the third; and that each of those defects is of constitutional dimension. Accordingly, this order is voidable and requires remand to correct those defects through new findings and conclusions.
Conclusion
We remand this case to the trial court for new findings and conclusions as required by McCune and K.I., without hearing new evidence.
Dickson, C.J., and Rucker, David, and Massa, JJ., concur.