Off to school you (they) go — are you ready?
It’s that time of year when we celebrate children’s graduations from high school (one of us is experiencing this for the second time). For many people, there is also the anticipation of life away from home for the first time for both the graduate and the family this fall at college.
So much hard work and dedication have gone into arriving at this point, and a new level of maturity is, you hope, on the horizon. There are many items on the new college student’s checklist once all the summer celebrations are over.
While the priority may be on selecting the appropriate roommate, meal plan and classes, one often overlooked item is the topic of surrogate decision making.
Whoa! You Elder Law Guys are such Debbie Downers! How can you bring up this topic at such a joyous time?
For many families, this is the first time they will spend time away from their children for an extended period of time. Things are much more connected now via smartphones (we remember having to call back home to our parents and then split the paper phone bill half sheets with our roommates monthly or putting quarters into dormitory pay phones). However, if an adult (age 18 or older) has a medical event rendering her/him unable to adequately communicate, even briefly, you’ll need something more than a phone to help them out from a distance.
Many families overlook the fact that once a child turns age 18, he/she becomes a legal adult and the law protects that person’s rights to privacy as well as the ability to make legal, financial and healthcare decisions. Remember the awkwardness the first time your child’s doctor informed you that your 18-year-old has to consent to sharing information with you? This situation is exacerbated when your college child is five hours away.
What happens if your child is playing lacrosse at college and is knocked unconscious and taken to the local hospital? Of course, you want to speak with the medical personnel at the hospital to discover the child’s status and also make medical decisions and authorize treatments, especially if they are time sensitive.
Therein lies the problem. Your child could be 18 or 88 and he/she is still an adult and surrogate decision making is typically granted through a court-ordered guardianship or by the adult child’s signing of a Power of Attorney and/or a Health Care Directive in advance.
Now some of you researchers out there will say you’ve discovered that Pennsylvania has a law that allows certain family members and friends to make healthcare decisions for one another — and you would be right.
But try to explain the law to a healthcare professional who has been trained to ask for documentation before interfacing with a third party. Oh yea, and your child may not be in Pennsylvania, so who knows what the laws are at that out-of-state college or university?
To help solve this situation, have your child sign both an Advance Directive for Health Care and financial Power of Attorney document before he/she heads off to school. These documents take only a short time to prepare and can name the parents or other trusted family members to act as the child’s agent to make all these legal decisions in the event the child cannot.
It’s also simply a good idea to get the child into the mindset of being proactive. This may be one of the best graduation gifts you give to her/him.
The child can change or cancel the documents at any time but at least he/she has something that is legally enforceable in a crisis, and those documents can be valid for years until the child gets around to preparing her/his own formal estate plan after college. Think about how routinely our male children sign up for Selective Service at age 18. Practically speaking, in the last half century surrogate decision making is more likely needed than going to war (hopefully, these days).
One final note; if you are the parent of a new college student, your life is changing also and it might be a good time to look at your own estate planning documents and update (or create) your own estate plan.