Raising a grandchild or a relative's child, when it started with a phone call

Everything here lives in your own household hub. The child joins it as a child member, with a login suited to their age or none at all for a toddler. Adults in the house, a partner, a grown son who helps out, see the adult side. The child sees the apps meant for them and nothing else.

Nobody outside the house sees any of it unless you invite them. Not the child's parents, not other relatives, not the school. Each household's data is kept in its own database, separate from every other household's, and the child's records are encrypted before they are stored. Who else gets access, and to what, is a decision you make one person at a time.

The papers come from everywhere: a court order or guardianship letter, a power of attorney or consent form the parent signed, the birth certificate, the insurance card, immunization records, a school enrollment form. Family Records is built for exactly this. It keeps a document vault and a card for each child, and children in the household see none of it.

1. Photograph or scan every paper you have, as soon as you have it, and add it as a record. Many arrive as a single copy.
2. Give anything temporary an expiry date: a short-term guardianship order, a consent form valid for six months, an insurance card. Anything lapsing within 45 days rises to the top of the list, so the renewal is not discovered at the pharmacy counter.
3. When a paper is replaced, replace the record. The old version is kept, file and all, so you can show what was in force on a given date.
4. Fill in the child card: their doctor and dentist, school, teacher, allergies, medications, and clothing and shoe sizes, because a child who arrives with one bag needs everything bought at once.

Larger files that are not about the child, such as your own correspondence with a lawyer or the benefits office, go in Documents, in an adults-only folder.

A child who arrives in a hurry often arrives without their medical history, and you rebuild it one appointment at a time. Health Cards holds what matters in a bad moment: every allergy with its severity, triggers, symptoms and what to do, every medicine with its dose, where it is kept and when to give it, and emergency contacts. It prints as a card for the fridge, the school bag, or the respite carer, and it can be shared as a read-only link that stops working after the day, week, or month you pick.

If they take daily medicine, for asthma, attention, sleep, or anything else, enter it in Medications with its times. The hub nudges at each time, any adult in the house can tick the dose, and the people you name hear about a missed dose half an hour later. Medications prints a current list and a record of doses taken, which is what the new pediatrician will ask for.

Appointments keeps the recurring health visits for each person in the household, the well-child check, the dentist every six months, the eye exam, therapy, with an emailed nudge when it is time to book and a visit history. A child new to the house is often behind on several at once; the list shows which.

A child dropped into an unfamiliar house does not know the rules, the timings, or what happens next, and asking feels risky. Routines makes the morning and the evening something they can see: the steps written out, ticked off as they go, the same every day. For a younger child, a tablet on the kitchen wall can show today's routine as big tappable tiles, so what comes next does not depend on anyone saying it.

Keep the first routines short and kind, closer to how their old home ran than to how you would like yours to run. The guide to morning and bedtime routines has more on building them up.

The household calendar holds school, contact visits, therapy, and court dates, filtered by who each event is for, with a warning when two clash. Contacts keeps the caseworker if there is one, the school office, the teacher, the doctor, the lawyer, and the relative who can do Thursday pickup. Imported once, it is the list the whole house uses.

If the child's parent is part of their life and contact is safe and permitted, put the visits on the calendar and tell the parent what they need to know by whatever route works. Giving a parent a login to anything is a separate question, and the answer depends on the child, the parent, and any court order, not on what software makes possible. Nothing in your household is visible to anyone you have not invited.

Some of what you hold is not for the child to stumble on: the court papers, the reason they came to you, the notes from a difficult contact visit. Family Records and Health Cards are adults-only, and a Documents folder can be made adults-only. A child member does not see them, on a tablet or on their own phone.

The harder privacy is outward. A child in kinship care often has a story that is not yours to tell, and sometimes a person who must not find out where they live. Do not put their name or photo on a page shared by link with a wide circle, and think twice before adding them to group albums or announcements that leave the house. When the relatives want news, tell them what the child is happy for them to know, and no more.

Grandparents raising grandchildren think about this more than anyone, and are least likely to have written the answer down. If you were suddenly in hospital, who collects the child from school, which papers let them, and what do they need to know about the child by tonight?

In Case of Emergency holds that answer: the person who takes over, where the court papers are, the doctor, the school, the medicines, and the bedtime routine, in entries only adults or a named group can read and children cannot. It prints, or saves as a PDF, to give the person you named now, while you can explain it. The guide to making your household survivable if something happens to you covers the rest of the household.

If the child was placed with you by a child-welfare agency, as a licensed foster or kinship foster carer, the agency's rules come first. They often limit photographs, social media, who may know the child's name and where they live, and how records are kept. A household hub is not agency software and is not the case record. Ask the caseworker before you put the child's name, photo, or records into any app, including this one, and keep the agency's own forms and reports in the system they give you.

What the hub can still do, within those rules, is the household side: the bedtime routine, the medicine nudge, the school calendar, the card on the fridge. The paperwork the agency owns stays with the agency.

• Family Records
• Health Cards
• Documents
• Medications
• Appointments & Check-ups
• Routines
• Calendar
• Contacts
• In Case of Emergency

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. Install the ones this guide uses and skip the rest.

• How the private household hub works
• A care team for an adult with a disability that keeps them in charge of it
• Setting the household up for a school year that does not unravel
• Leaving the kids with a sitter: what they actually need to know
• Morning and bedtime routines for kids that run without a parent narrating them
• Making your household survivable if something happens to you