A guardian is not a member: the account type most club software lacks

A guardian account is a person record joined to a child record by a relationship that carries its own permissions. The distinction that matters is where authority lives: not on the guardian, not on the child, but on the edge between them. One adult can be guardian to 3 children with different rights over each, and 1 child can have 4 adults attached with different rights each.

Most club software does not model this. It has members, and lets a member have dependants — a parent-shaped hole with a member-shaped object pushed into it. The seams show the first time a household disagrees, and households disagree routinely.

The person, the child, and the row between them

Three objects, and the third is the one people leave out. The guardian is a person with contact details and a login. The child is the member — registered, booked, marked on registers. The relationship is a row of its own, and everything contested belongs to it.

• The pair it joins. One guardian, 1 child — never a household, because households are not stable and a child may belong to 2.
• The stated relationship. Parent, grandparent, foster carer, childminder. Descriptive only: it must never silently confer rights.
• The authority set. Which of the 5 actions below this adult may take, each granted independently.
• Effective dates. When the relationship starts and ends, both auditable.
• The primary-contact flag, held on the edge, because the primary contact for 1 sibling is not always the primary contact for another.
• Who granted it. A relationship created by an administrator and one asserted at self-registration carry different weight.

Five things an adult may be allowed to do, granted one at a time

The right to receive information is the one clubs most often fold into the others, and the one that causes most distress when it is wrong. An adult told nothing about a cancellation finds out at the gate; an adult who should not have been told a venue now knows it. Same field, and not the same field as booking.

The four households that break an account-level model

1. Separated parents. Two adults, 1 child, different rights: one pays, both receive information, one may not collect. On an account-level model the second parent gets the first parent's login or nothing.
2. Blended families. A step-parent with full authority for 1 child in the house and none for another, in the same basket, on the same evening.
3. Grandparents and childminders. Real collection authority, no consent authority, often no address the club should be sending schedules to.
4. Siblings on different arrangements. The commonest of the 4, and the one that disproves "permissions belong to the family" — worked through in one household, 3 children, 2 guardians and consents that disagree.

None of these is exotic: a club of 200 children contains all 4. That is the argument for modelling the edge on day one.

Guardianship ends, so the row needs dates

A childminder's arrangement ends with the term. A court order can change what a parent may do overnight. If a relationship can only be deleted, each of those is a destructive edit, and the club loses the ability to say who was permitted to do what on the evening something happened.

Never delete a guardian relationship. End it, with a date and a reason, so "who could have collected this child in March" still has an answer in December.

That history is also why the incident record behaves differently: an incident about a child is not automatically visible to that child's guardians, and its access rules are narrower than a club administrator's — argued in what a safeguarding incident log has to capture.

What the guardian record must never turn into

It must not become a member. Guardians are not registered, occupy no place in a session, and belong outside headcounts, capacity maths and anything deciding whether somebody has drifted away — the definitions in what counts as a lapsed member apply to the child, never the adult paying. It must not become a shared login either: 2 adults on 1 account cannot hold different rights, be audited separately, or have access withdrawn from one of them. Whether the child gets a login of their own is a separate question, decided by what they are asked to do rather than by age.

And anything automated has to read the edge, not the account. A reminder job, a waitlist filler or an assistant answering "can I move Ravi to Thursday" must resolve authority per child before acting — the permission failure named in what breaks when AI agents run in production, where software acts beyond the user it acts for. That boundary is ordinary AI agent and automation work in our sports and fitness practice, alongside the rest of guardians, minors and safeguarding.

• youth sports
• data modelling
• safeguarding
• permissions