Five guidelines for choosing an alternate caregiver

1. Think about the age and personality of the people who will be anointed as your replacements if your life ends before you planned it would, so that the blow from your loss does not have to be even more devastating by having unnecessary fallout. Deborah’s mom was the first guardian that Tim and Deborah selected. I persuaded them to nix that nomination not because Deborah’s mother wasn’t lovely—she was—but because she was 80 years old when the children were 13 and 15. She would likely not live an incredibly long time more, and even if she did, she was hardly equipped to become a parent again to traumatized teenagers. Moreover, if she had passed away, Deborah and Tim would likely forget, in their grief, that she had been designated the alternate guardian, and they would neglect to appoint a new person.

2. If your children are already going to be the low people on the totem pole in a new family, and as they will already be dealing with the sudden loss of both of their parents, don’t make them feel lost in the crowd by placing with a family with enough kids to field a baseball team. Joe and Barbara, among all the conscientious decisions they made, weren’t perfect. When they selected the guardian of their children, they chose Barbara’s brother, who already had six kids. I sort of understand the rationale—pick a guy and his wife whom the kids know and like, and someone who has ample experience raising kids. But do you really think three kids could come into a family of eight after losing their parents in some sort of tragedy and not feel like the lowest three on the totem pole?

3. For your children’s alternate caregivers, endeavor to place them with a family with children near their ages, preferably a family they already know and enjoy. Charles and Brenda did the right thing when they agreed to name Charles’s brother and sister-in-law as their sons’ alternate guardians. The uncle and aunt had two children close to the boys’ ages, and the adults were vital and energetic. I believe that grandparents are not usually as practical a choice as some other relatives or close family friends would be.

4. Consider the location of the guardians you choose to name for your children in case you die before they are of legal age to care for themselves. Of all my clients, Jeff and Pamela probably did the worst job of providing a contingency plan for their children. First, they named grandparents as the guardians. Second, the grandparents lived 1,000 miles away in southern California. Third, Pamela and Jeff sent the kids to live with them frequently, whenever they felt like it, while both parents were still alive and very well.

5. Respect your children’s grief by planning for the unlikely event of both of your early deaths, pre-arranging alternate care so that they do not have to make adult choices that affect the course of their entire lives while they are grieving. Teresa and Donald had three couples in mind—all family friends—to care for their only daughter, Jackie, if both of them died before she became an adult. They both agreed that all three couples would have been equally acceptable as Jackie’s guardian. Teresa and Donald asked me to write up a condition in the Mediation Report that Jackie would be given a choice of those three couples. What? Ask a child who has just lost both parents in her teenage years to choose who will try to take their place? That was craziness, and I expected Teresa and Donald, two levelheaded, educated people, to be more aware of the pitfalls of such a choice.