EMERGENCY! WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR CHILDREN

In this newsletter, we will begin a series on the 6 common mistakes parents make when naming guardians for their children.  Naming guardians for minor children is the first step in the estate planning process for most parents.  Without proper counseling concerning all of the issues involved, mistakes can be made. 

            The first common mistake is that you very likely only named long-term care guardians and did not make any arrangements for the immediate term care of your children if you were in an accident.  This means your children could be taken out of your home and into the arms of strangers until the authorities could figure out what to do.

            What about the short term?  For example, your children are with a baby sitter while you have gone out together for the evening.  In the unlikely event that you are in a bad car accident, the police are going to come to your house.  You left your cell phone number and your neighbor’s phone number with the baby sitter.  What do you think would happen?

            Without legal documents naming short-term guardians BY LAW your children can be taken into the custody of the Department of Children and Families child protective services and placed in foster care until the children’s named legal guardian is available.  In many cases, this legal guardian (say, a sibling or parent of the parent) lives out of state and needs a few days to arrive on the scene.  Naming a local temporary guardian can avoid having the children placed in foster care for those few days.

            For short-term guardians we recommend that you consider people who live within a 20 minute drive of your home.  People your children know, love and trust that can be there right away.  You should provide them with Legal Documents they need.  The baby sitter should be instructed on whom to call in the event of an emergency. 

            To ensure that a child’s important information is known in a medical emergency, Cramer Law Center registers its clients in a service that provides instant electronic access to a child’s emergency information and documents, including documents which name local, temporary guardians.  This program is designed to provide access to the information a non-parent caregiver might need in case the child in their care faces an emergency situation.

            So make sure you name local, temporary guardians for your minor children and that the legal documents naming those guardians are readily accessible in the event of an emergency.  We can help.