Baxnet Ideas · Founder note
A Godparent Is a Promise Without an Interface
TL;DR: A godparent makes a long-term promise to a child, but receives almost no practical job description. Personal intelligence could help make that promise useful.
Investing in People — Part Eight. This follows Friends and Family Already Invest in People. We Just Give Them Bad Instruments., which looks at how people close to us can provide financial support without leaving the meaning of that support unsettled. This article asks whether one old relationship could be given a more useful role from the beginning. If you are new to the series, start with Everyone Is Investable. Nobody Should Be Ownable..
At a christening, an adult stands beside a baby and makes promises that may have to survive for the rest of their lives.
Then there are photographs, lunch, a card to put somewhere safe and, quite often, no real job description.
The role is larger than the version many of us practise. The Church of England describes godparenting as a lifelong commitment involving time, conversations about the bigger questions and practical help with making good choices. The promise is to keep supporting the child long after the ceremony.
In ordinary life, the role can gradually become a birthday message, a Christmas present and occasional news relayed through the parents. Plenty of godparents do much more, obviously. They do it through effort and affection, without much structure around them.
That gap interests me. The godparent is one of the few roles we deliberately create around long-term belief in another person. It sits somewhere between family, mentor and trusted friend. Yet we give it almost no practical way to know when attention, advice or a modest amount of money might genuinely change something.
Personal intelligence could make the promise more useful. It could also make it invasive. The difference would be in the permissions.
A useful adult at a different distance
Parents are close to every difficult week. Teachers see a particular academic period. A sports coach or music teacher sees one part of a child in one setting. A godparent can occupy a different position: close enough to care, but far enough away to notice another version of the story.
Imagine a child who has spent two years taking apart broken radios, saving components in takeaway containers and watching repair videos. It may not appear in a school report. It may look like clutter at home. To a godparent who works with electronics—or simply knows somebody who does—it could be the beginning of a useful conversation, a visit to a workshop or the first project for which the child receives proper tools.
The purpose is not to identify a nine-year-old’s optimal career. Children need room to be briefly obsessed with dinosaurs, drums, insects and a hundred other things without each interest becoming a forecast. The useful information is smaller: this curiosity keeps returning; the child has asked for help; here is a moment when another adult could show up.
A personal intelligence engine could help the child and their parents preserve those threads across years. It might hold selected projects, interests the child has chosen to pursue, questions they want help answering and decisions on which they would welcome another perspective. The godparent would be one member of a trusted circle, not the authorised interpreter of the child’s future.
Sending them a score would miss the point. A score invites judgement. Context gives them something to talk about.
Being useful does not require watching
The creepy version is easy to design. Give the godparent a dashboard showing messages, location, grades, health information, mood predictions and alerts whenever the child appears to drift from a modelled path. Call it care. Add a reassuring colour palette.
That would be surveillance with a ceremonial origin story.
The godparent should receive invitations, not a feed. A useful update might say that the child wants to learn animation, has completed three short projects and would like somebody outside the household to look at them. Another might arrive because subject choices are approaching and the child has asked for a conversation with an adult who knows them but is not involved in the daily negotiations at home.
The child should be able to see what was shared, why it was shared and who can still access it. Contributions of money should never widen those permissions.
The right model would change as the child grows. During infancy, parents might maintain a small continuity record and share ordinary family updates. During childhood, the child can start choosing which projects and interests leave the immediate household. By adolescence, most access should require their active agreement. At adulthood, the childhood permissions should expire rather than quietly following them into work, relationships and the rest of their life.
As the child gains agency, the godparent’s access should shrink.
That principle is consistent with the direction already taken in UK child-data guidance. The Information Commissioner’s Office says services likely to be used by children should put their best interests first, use high-privacy defaults, collect only the data needed and avoid routine sharing. Its Children’s Code also treats profiling and parental controls as areas requiring particular care.
A personal intelligence system for a child should therefore become increasingly child-authored. It should not assemble a permanent behavioural dossier first and offer control later.
A godparent and a guardian are different jobs
There is a persistent assumption that a godparent automatically becomes responsible for a child if the parents die. In the UK, that is not the legal position. The Church of England says directly that godparents are not the people who will automatically care for the child in that situation. Legal guardianship requires a separate arrangement, such as appointment in a parent’s will or a court order. Government guidance makes that distinction explicit.
Medical information does not simply pass to a godparent either. NHS guidance says online access to a child under 16’s health services is limited to a parent or guardian with legal parental responsibility, with the child’s consent increasingly relevant as they become capable of making the decision themselves. Access normally ends at 16 unless the young person wants it set up again.
Those are important boundaries, rather than administrative inconveniences to design around.
If a godparent has also been separately appointed as a legal guardian, personal intelligence could support a more deliberate handover during an awful moment. It could help locate essential medical information, education history, accessibility needs, important relationships, routines and the child’s own preferences. That does not require handing over every message or inference collected since birth. Formal records would remain the source of truth, and access would follow the law.
The valuable thing is continuity. A new guardian should not have to reconstruct the child’s life from school emails, old phones and half-remembered conversations while both of them are grieving.
More than £10 a month
The familiar financial version of godparenting is a standing order into a savings account. It is a good thing to do. In the UK, anyone can contribute to a Junior ISA, while the money belongs to the child. They can take control of the account at 16 and withdraw from it at 18. The contributor does not acquire a claim over the child or the eventual use of the money.
Long-term savings are only one form of useful backing, though.
For the child taking radios apart, £250 spent on tools, a supervised course and travel to a repair workshop at twelve might do more than the same £250 arriving as cash at eighteen. Another child may need an instrument, tournament fees, software, books or a train ticket to visit somebody working in a field they have never encountered at home. Sometimes the godparent’s time or introduction is the scarce thing.
I can imagine a simple structure with two parts. One remains protected long-term savings. The other is a modest opportunity fund that can be used, with appropriate parental involvement and growing child consent, when a specific interest becomes worth exploring properly. The record would show what was funded and what the child learned, including when an experiment went nowhere.
It should be perfectly acceptable for it to go nowhere. Childhood exploration is not an investment portfolio, and a godparent should not behave like a talent scout impatient for returns.
That leads to the hard boundary. Money given during childhood should be a gift, trust or other child-appropriate arrangement. It must not buy a percentage of future earnings, an additional vote over education or privileged access to personal data. If the person reaches adulthood and later chooses to enter one of the bounded investing-in-people arrangements discussed elsewhere in this series, that would require a new decision and a separate agreement. Nothing should roll over merely because somebody paid for piano lessons ten years earlier.
A godparent can invest in the child’s options. They should never own a claim on the child.
The role cannot depend on wealth
This version of godparenting could reproduce inequality very quickly. Some children have godparents who can fund a Junior ISA, specialist coaching and a summer abroad. Others have godparents who are already helping their own families make rent. Some do not have a godparent at all.
Money cannot be what makes the role legitimate.
A godparent who calls regularly, reads the draft, attends the small performance, remembers the ambition and makes one thoughtful introduction may contribute more than somebody who transfers a large amount and remains otherwise absent. Personal intelligence should help direct attention as much as capital.
Public and community structures could help here too. Schools, foundations or public programmes could match small opportunity contributions without requiring a wealthy adult to lead the round. Children without traditional godparents might nominate another trusted adult at the appropriate age, with safeguarding and permissions designed for that context. A religious or family ceremony cannot become the entrance ticket to support. The useful thing to borrow is the promise of a long relationship.
Give the promise a job description
A modern godparent would have a fairly modest set of duties. Stay present. Receive only the context the child and parents have chosen to share. Ask questions before giving advice. Help create opportunities when possible. Understand that funding buys no authority. Prepare properly if they have also accepted a separate legal guardianship role. Hand control of the relationship and its records back to the child as they grow.
None of that requires a live dashboard. Most of it still happens through a walk, a meal, a call or an afternoon spent making something together.
The technology would not make somebody a good godparent. It could make it easier for a good one to know when showing up matters.