Newbie here, not new to estrangement unfortunately.
I have been estranged from my daughter for about 3 years and grandchildren for the same, sad story but familiar to many. Involved us having to care for the children via social services, but them not having put anything formal in place, daughter unstable due to drug use, yet she took the children back unexpectedly, social services then claimed that they had no real record of the issues or that they'd directed us to have the grandchildren. It was for a couple of months but we had a lot of contact with them before this also.
In short we felt we were shafted, daughter and her boyfriend stopped us from seeing grandchildren, social services didn't really help at all, it was a huge disappointment, but we did go to court and try to stop the obvious trauma which we knew was being inflicted on our grandchildren. I don't agree that people shouldn't do this it is entirely up to them, but in our case unfortunately although cafcass were supportive and encouraging to both us and daughter, the court referred it back to social services, and well... you can imagine it was a massive change of approach. Records have disappeared, notes went astray, they claimed daughter had never had the issues we had described and that they took on board initially, take it from me, it is a gamble taking the legal route, grandparents have no legal rights, we were given permission to apply with no safeguarding issues but things went wrong when the case was passed back to social services, who did the assessment and basically said it should be left to our daughter to deal with, meaning it won't be!
Its incredibly sad for the children, and I don't know if there is going to be a sea change in the law but I doubt it will change in the near future, but I do regularly write to my MP and am active on twitter about this issue, if it has shown me anything it is a huge eye opener and I my view of hierarchical systems such as court and organisations that are supposed to help has changed massively.
And for me I have been using the time to do lots of work on myself, mainly because I have had to cope with the huge loss of our beloved daughter and grandchildren, but also because I had to feel I was doing something positive with it all.
We have tried periodically to send things to our daughter (she always takes money but sends presents for the children back to us), and tried to reach out, I normally get an angry response just saying that we are being reported to the police. And I think reaching out is futile now, they are very stuck in their hatred and really they always have been ever since the grandchildren had to stay with us. And there comes a time when you have to remove yourself and give in, just because it is too painful to hold on.
I feel l now owe it to myself and to my other children and family to live the best life I can and to wait until the grandchildren come to us, or our daughter has some sort of life change, but I am not sitting waiting or expecting this any longer. I just recognise that just this time I have to admit defeat and back out gracefully.