Choosing a Guardian Part 1

When thinking of creating a simple estate plan, that is creating a last will and testament, health care directive and a power of attorney over your finances, one of the most daunting considerations is who will care for your children or other legal dependents. Here lies one of the most important, difficult, yet motivating decisions to start the estate planning process. Who will comfort my children upon my death? How will they fare without me? What will the impact of my death be on their lives? Honestly, these, and others like them, are questions you will never actually know the answers to. But there are two things you can have pretty good answers for if you prepare an estate plan:

1) Who will care for my children and,

2) What resources are available to them upon my death.

Let’s start with the first, who will care for my children? Now if you had to answer this question in this very moment, you might immediately call to mind who these people would be and what your children will inherit. But for some others it might not be such an easy thing to answer. What makes this choice difficult is quite often we don’t know what questions to ask ourselves when deciding who to name as guardian. Quite often we end up in the weeds trying to identify the perfect person or people, and then we get stuck there and begin to grieve for our children. But I assure you there are two very simple questions that can help you identify your person or people. The first question you might consider is the who. Who is the person, or people, who are at the right age and stage of life, have the means, and have time to care for your children. When you evaluate in this way you may quickly pivot from an aging parent or grandparent, and begin to look more closely at a sibling or family friend.

The second question that may help you decide who should be your guardian is simply this: what is important to you as parents, meaning what are your values, what are your thoughts on discipline, what kind of lifestyle (ex. rural vs city) do you want for your children? There are definitely other considerations you should make but if you find that same name or names comes up when you answer these top two, you might very well have figure out your who. In a later post we can talk a bit more about the what.