The 18th Birthday…Guardianship and More…

In a blink we went from adulthood on the horizon to adulthood less than two weeks away.

I thought I would be better prepared.  I am very much a planner.

I spend the majority of my sleepless night (when they occur) reading and researching information about these things.  The things missing from every parenting book or empty nester blog, the invisible and isolating things that go into raising an individual with a disability.

There is no guidebook or resource easily accessible or readily available.  Like all parents, we rely on each other, if you are fortunate to have that as an option, or we simply surf to the edge of the internet and hope the information you find is accurate and useful…both things that can be hard to find online.

Combine that with legal rules vary state to state, an already big topic becomes enormous awfully quick.

In one frantic sleepless night, I stumble on a resource from The Arc Tennessee.  I was quickly bombarded with words like: conservatorship, power of attorney, capacity, representative payees.

Do I know what these all mean now?  Not in detail.

If this was a cooking show, my skills would be just above microwaving water for sweet tea.  I make no assumptions of being an expert and I don’t think there is a clear way to ever feel entirely confident that I would ever have enough knowledge to feel steadfast in the decisions we were going to be forced to make.

To be honest, I didn’t even know we were going to have to help him make.

Was he even capable of making that call?

Capacity.

But at the end of the day, we found worksheets and questionnaires, short videos and explanations that helped us and him understand what kind of help he would need as an adult.

And while each family has to cross this bridge when they get there and find the best path for themselves, the only thing that was a priority, the final parent decision I planned to make for him before he became an adult, was that we would begin with a least restrictive approach and evaluate things as time went on.

To us, it was much easier to add in more restrictive support versus removing it.

Does this work for everyone?  I don’t know, but like all things in the disability world, there never has been nor there ever will be a one size fits all approach.