Understanding Guardianship

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Guardianship is the relationship between a person who has no capacity to make informed decisions and a competent individual who undertakes to ensure his well-being by making decisions for him. The person who cannot make informed decisions and is above 18 years of age with a disability that cause incompetency is referred to as a ward. The ward is defined as an individual with mental incapacity who may be suffering from acquired brain injury, intellectual ability, conditions associated with old age, chronic intoxication, dementia, conditions related to stroke severe mental illness.

The person may not be adequately described given his condition, but his inability to make decisions. Consideration is given to the fact that any risk or harm that could be encountered by the ward because of his inability to effectively takes care of his personal effects or affairs. This is a relationship that the law recognizes. The guardian is authorized by law and hence takes away the rights to make informed decisions from the ward. It is true to say that guardianship is the option taken as a last resort, when everything other alternative has failed.

Guardianship can be avoided by either understanding the services of a living trustee to manage assets, durable power of attorney or durable health care power of attorney. It is good to go further and assess your loved ones’ decision making ability. If the ward is proved by the court that he/she is mentally incapacitated, a guardian is assigned to “involuntary guardianship.” For those people who on their own accord choose to have someone to manage their affairs, this is referred to as “voluntary guardianship.” There are a lot of restrictions tied to guardianship like bonds, court involvement to a great extent, annual accounting, spending and investing the wards money.

All alternatives in appointing an individual must be exhausted because of the restrictions involved in guardianship. It is only when the ward has no close relative or friend to undertake this role that a person from outside the immediate family is appointed. The process helps the ward to select an appropriate person to help in making decisions. Guardianship appointment can be for only the individual or the individual and his property. The role of guardianship depends on the seriousness of the ward’s disability.

Guardianship for children who are under 18 years would apply to those in refugee camps; it would be useful for children when one makes a medical oriented decision for a child and get feedback about the medical reports. A guardian would make decisions about the schooling of a child and gets reports from school. The guardian would also incorporate a child on someone’s medical insurance cover who is not a biological parent. A guardian can also organize for a driving license for a minor. Whenever the child moves to change location, it is the duty of the guardian to inform the court. If the child moves to another country then the guardian should request for a “change of venue.” In legal sense, guardianship for a child ends at the age of 18.

Types of Child Custody

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Well, the term isn’t all that new and it is actually something that we all know about but it’s just put in another term that most of us do not know about. Child custody in simple terms is the relationship between a parent and his/her offspring. There are some other various things that we may not know about child custody for example the forms of child custody that are out there. Though it really depends on where you come from, there are about six forms of custody that are widely known by most people who deal with child custody.

The first form of child custody is the alternating custody and this is whereby the child or children if they are many live with a single parent for an agreed period of time and then after the period is over, the child switches over to the other parent and lives with him/her for the same period of time. To the kids, this is a bit strenuous and if they are young, it tends to be a bit too odd for them when they see other families living in harmony while when it comes to them the only thing that they can do is visit one parent for a specified period of time and the other for another specified period. There are several disadvantages of this form of child custody and the first one is that the children may grow up having the same marital problems as their parents.

The other form of child custody out there is the bird’s nest child custody and this is where the children are the ones who sit in the houses and it is upon the parents to take turns to visit them. This makes it a little bit easier for the kids since they don’t have to go back and forth every week to see one of their parents. In fact, most people find this method more convenient because it is the parents who broke up and not the kid with the parent. It is therefore upon the parent to go and make sure that his/her kids are alright regardless of the situation.
Joint custody on the other hand is where both of the parents have custody over the child. This is perhaps the most common form of child custody out there and since most people are aware of it, few people have issues against this form of custody.

A close type of custody that’s almost like the joint custody is the sole custody where only one parent has legal responsibility over the child and this may at times happen when the other parent is either dead or unfit to take care of the kids. Split custody divides the children into two so that if a family has four children, two of them will go to the father’s side and the rest will go to the mother’s side. The last form of custody is the third party custody where the children are taken care of by someone completely different other than the mother and the father.

Child Support

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This is certainly not a new term but most of the time it is confused for various other things. Child support has many meanings but the context in which you use it is what makes the difference. Let’s say you have a son who’s not so good at math. Every time he comes home with a report card, you don’t have to look at what he has gotten or how he has performed because of how he has been performing in the past. Well, offering child support to this particular child will do much good to him than simply buying him more and more books which he will find harder and harder to use. Child support basically tries to motivate a child who doesn’t know his capabilities so that in the end he may reach that target.

There are many people out there who without child support would have never made it in life and the funny thing is that some of these people are the ones who came up with some of the greatest inventions we know of. Just a little boost into how these young minds thought is what was needed for them to turn around and start living new lives.
Offering child support doesn’t only help the child but also helps the world at large since whatever good the child will do after being supported will always go back to the community and that is us. The sad thing about child support is that not everyone has the same views about child support. Some people out there even prefer making children feel worse than they already feel about their situation and this makes them even harder to turn around because they will be believing that they can’t do anything worthwhile themselves. The bad thing about a child having such thoughts at an early age is that they will end up being worse when they grow up. Most of the things that will be running through their heads will be more destructive than constructive and that is one way we would have made a monster from an innocent boy.

Child support isn’t only about helping a child to do better in one area or helping a child by consoling him in areas where he is weak at. Child support also involves correcting a child’s behavior the minute you start noticing that his behavior is starting to get out of hand. To some people, that may seem a bit too harsh but in actual sense you’re really helping out the kid to be a better person in the future. There are other people who take this to extreme ends and begin harming a child. That isn’t what child support is about because its main goal is to make the child a better person through support. One thing that most people do not know about child support is that almost all people of all ages need support one time in their lives so you shouldn’t wonder why child support should be emphasized while a kid is still young.

Child Visitation

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There’s always more than one thing that differentiates us from one another, and while you may come up with a whole list of these things, the one that you may forget to include may be the fact that you have parents and some of the other people out there do not have parents. True, it is normal to not have parents depending on what happened in the past but that doesn’t mean that you can lack parents in today’s world. Yes, there are countries where people without parents really suffer a lot because of various things that they would have depended on their parents but if you look at it from another perspective, you’ll realize that there is always one universal parent who takes care of all of us.
Even though we have one universal parent, does it mean that we should stop taking care of our own kids and let the universal parent take care of all of us? Of course not and that is why you have to think about them. There are many kids without parents and you can imagine what it would feel like if you were the one who was always staring at other kids as they walk around with their parents. Well, they do get used to the idea that they do not have parents but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be visited at all. Visiting them in fact gives them hope that one day they will be loved and that they too, like all the other kids have an equal chance of succeeding in life.

Visiting children in an orphanage doesn’t cost any money either and one should thus not say that they didn’t have the time or the money to go visit children in an orphanage. In fact some of the children in those orphanages usually have just months to live before they can say farewell to the world because of the illnesses some of them have. A mother who didn’t deliver his/her baby in the right way and happened to have HIV/AIDS will also pass the virus onto her offspring and that would mean lots of suffering on the child’s side. After both of the parents have passed away, the only place that this child can go to may be to an orphanage where he/she will enjoy some of the months that he/she has before leaving us behind.

It’s usually a sad thing to watch that one child that would have been someone great on this earth perish with a cold heart because of lack of love from the rest of the world. It doesn’t mean that they would have done anything to change their fate, but the way that we ignore some of these small matters is what makes it bitter to think about. Of course we can’t change everyone but if there’s a small way in which one can be swayed to think about visiting a child in an orphanage rather than going to watch that football match, maybe the world might not seem so bitter in the eyes of that dying child.