A Primer on Guardianship was funded through a cooperative agreement between the Hunter College School of Social Work in New York and the Children’s Bureau to the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections.

According to Renne and Fiermonte, (2002) ASFA defines legal guardianship as ‘a judicially-created relationship between child/youth and guardian which is intended to be permanent and self-sustaining as evidenced by the transfer to the guardian of certain parental rights with respect to the child.’ These parental rights include: (1) protection; (2) education; (3) care and control of the person; (4) custody of the person; and (5) decision making.”

Guardianship offers children, youth and parents a pathway to permanency. Guardianship provides permanent caregivers with many of the same legal rights as birth parents and builds family relationships that can last a lifetime although the legal relationship established by a juvenile court guardianship ends when the child turns 18 and is considered an adult.  With guardianship, the birth parents rights do not have to be legally terminated and depending on what is in the best interest of the child, the birth family connections can be maintained with ongoing contacts after guardianship. The legal relationship between the guardian and young person does not end and may outlive the jurisdiction of the court.  Unlike a adoption, where a parent’s right to custody is completely and permanently terminated, legal guardianship suspends the parent’s custodial rights, but allows the parent and other relatives including siblings to continue to play a role in the young person’s life.  While guardians often have a blood relationship with the young person, ASFA explicitly states that a guardian need not be a blood relative, a guardian could also be fictive kin.

Legal guardianship is viewed as a more preferred, permanency option than long-term relative care. It is more permanent than foster care, and gives the guardian full control over caring for the young person often without child welfare agency involvement.

Guardianship may also be appealing for youth in kinship foster care because it allows relative caregivers to provide permanency and stability without ongoing state oversight and without termination of parental rights.

Guardianship is an area, which is huge in scope and an extremely important area of child welfare policy and practice. In putting together this new product we made a decision early on to limit our scope and we envision this as a Primer on Guardianship. Rather than attempting to address all guardianship issues in this document, we strategically present an overview of the salient issues. It is intended as an online tool for programs, states and tribes where promising practices, programs and resources are made available. For this primer, we thoroughly reviewed provisions in the legislation that address guardianship. Our goal is to provide the field with information on the components that support guardianship. We tried to provide a broad array of resources from research, state policies, procedures and practice and an organizational self-study guide.

I am grateful to our colleagues at the Children’s Bureau/ACF/DHHS for their insight into the need for such a toolkit. Taffy Champion, Federal Project Officer for the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections, has spearheaded this process and provided guidance and direction in making this Primer a reality.

I want thank the staff and our consultants at the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections for their work on this Primer. I want to recognize especially Joan Morse our Assistant Director at the NRCPFC who coordinated the development of the primer and our NRCPFC project consultant, Madelyn Freundlich, who took the lead in its development.

Gerald P. Mallon, DSW
Julia Lathrop Professor of Child Welfare
Executive Director, NRCPFC at the Hunter College School of Social Work