It was a love story from the beginning, and now the Rev. Joseph Hardy wants to make it legal. For the past four years, the Rev. Hardy, a Baptist minister from Tampa, and his wife have been raising their great-grandchildren, ages 2, 4 and 6. "They've got us, we've got them, and we want to keep it that way," the Rev. Hardy says of the couple's decision to initiate adoption proceedings.

The only thing standing in the way is a staggering $2,500 in legal fees.

More than 371,000 Florida children are living in households headed by grandparents or other family members, in many cases because their parents struggle with substance abuse, incarceration, domestic violence, mental illness and other debilitating problems. Despite their commitment, however, policy-makers and government agencies often deny these caregivers and the children they are raising the most basic supports.

One of the most pressing priorities for kinship-care families is statewide legal assistance that would allow them to establish guardianship, adoption and other permanent legal arrangements for the children in their care. In a recent review of local court records, the Florida Kinship Center found that the majority of the relative caregivers surveyed lack formal legal authority over the children they are raising. As a result, families have trouble with tasks as simple as enrolling children in school, authorizing basic health care and vaccinations, and adding children to their public housing leases.

So why don't grandparents and other relatives just go to court and fix the problem?

First, there are not nearly enough free legal services to serve the one-fifth of Florida grandparent caregivers living under the poverty line -- less than $15,150 a year for a family of two. Unfortunately, even retired grandparents living on a fixed income earn too much to qualify for legal aid but too little to afford the high cost of a private attorney.

In addition to this financial Catch-22, family law cases are both legally and emotionally complex. In order to obtain legal guardianship, for example, grandparents must prove that the parents are unfit, a standard that is sometimes difficult to meet. In the case of adoption, parental rights must be severed altogether.

Procedural barriers also can seem insurmountable. Verlene Hawkins, a 62-year-old Florida grandmother raising five of her grandchildren, suspended her plans to adopt a grandson because she was unable to identify his birth father. "My daughter named the father, but a DNA test proved her wrong," explains Ms. Hawkins, who was rejected by her local legal aid agency until she could properly identify the father.

A state grant to finance legal services for Florida kinship-care families is a cost-effective way to address this chronic lack of representation. With low-cost or free assistance based on income, grandparents would be able to establish permanent legal arrangements that would keep children out of the already overburdened foster-care system. Increasing the availability of affordable legal services also would leverage successful public-private partnerships that already are working to serve the legal needs of kinship-care families on a more limited basis. Most important, an affordable, easily accessible network of legal services would allow relative caregivers to keep the children in stable and loving homes.

Florida provides free legal representation to accused criminals and parents who have been charged with child abuse and neglect. Why not extend the same opportunity to grandparents and other relatives who have stepped forward, at great personal sacrifice, to raise children at risk?

Perhaps then, instead of debating the relative harms of gambling, diet pills and the legalization of other popular vices, state legislators will consider money to legalize something infinitely more beneficial: grandparents' lifelong commitment to their grandchildren.