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Children, Kin And Court: Designing Third Party Custody Policy To Protect Children, Third Parties And Parents, Josh Gupta-Kagan

Josh Gupta-Kagan

Millions of American children are primarily raised by people other than their parents, primarily grandparents and other kin, and millions more will be raised by third parties for some period of their childhood. In most such situations, informal arrangements negotiated by family members provide for these kinship networks to care for children effectively. But many cases require some formal legal arrangement. To enable third parties to obtain necessary services and benefits for children in their care whose parents are absent and to protect children from harm imposed by a parent in the proportionately rare but numerically significant situations in which …