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7. Introducing Parents To A Holistic Approach
Estate planners have the opportunity to influence the kind of planning their clients will pursue. Many prospective clients have only vague expectations about the process they are initiating. Even among clients who have some experience with estate planning, most need guidance on the personal as well as the technical side of the process from their attorney. The initial interview between client and attorney is a critical time for defining the client’s understanding, expectations, and wishes for the process ahead. The attorney’s questions and recommendations at this first meeting can orient parents with grown children to the approach that will serve them best.

Traditionally, the early stages of estate planning consist of the planner’s information gathering and making recommendations regarding the next steps. Whether intentionally or not, the attorney’s questions signal to the clients the appropriate content of the planning process. A narrow, financially focused interview conveys the sense that estate planning should be narrowly defined. The most powerful way to introduce parents to holistic estate planning is to ask broad, probing questions about their family, goals, and assets. This implicitly helps parents appreciate the full range of issues they will need to address, as well as the importance of getting input from their children.

The questions that best help parents appreciate the salience of the personal side of their estate planning center on three areas: individuals, relationships within the family, and the estate planning process itself. Parents themselves are arguably the most important individuals in this process—after all, it is their estate planning—but clarifying whom are they most concerned about may be helpful. What are their concerns for themselves as a couple and for each other? What are their hopes and fears for their children? What values would they like to see their children embrace after they have passed away? Estate planners may find it useful to plant the seed that parents need to think about their values. In their book, Silver Spoon Kids, Eileen and Jon Gallo point out that one major pitfall for some children is “money unaccompanied by values.” ²⁷ Many parents fear that money, especially large amounts of it, will do their children more harm than good. While this may be less true for parents with grown children, many parents still may worry about the negative effects of money on their children.

The strongest desire of most parents is for their children to be happy and healthy, regardless of their economic strata. Planners may ask parents about the legacy they wish to leave with their children and grandchildren? Have they considered writing an ethical will in which they describe the people, values, and experiences that have meant the most to them and of which they want their children to be aware?²⁸

In addition to inquiring about parents’ concerns for individuals within the family, asking parents specifically about their hopes and fears regarding the relationships within the family can be helpful. Relationships that need consideration are those between parents, between parents and children, between parents and grandchildren, and between the siblings. For example, does either parent have concerns about the spousal relationship as the estate is planned? How do the parents think their children’s relationships with one another will be affected by their planning? Questioning them about each relationship may reveal concerns that the parents might not have thought to verbalize.
Finally, inquiring about the parents’ feelings and thoughts about the estate planning process itself can be helpful. The prospect of working on their own estate plan may conjure up images of the final chapter in their own parents’ lives and how they handled their estate. Some people have strong, negative emotional reactions to the way their parents treated them in their estates and may not want a re-enactment with their own children. Many people do repeat their parents’ mistakes despite their best intentions.

Asking these types of questions about the personal side of the family transition is an implicit and powerful way to help parents recognize that the estate planning process is an opportunity—perhaps among their last—to have a profound influence on their children and grandchildren. But explicit descriptions of the advantages of talking openly with grown children about estate plans should augment the implicit messages of the interview. Among the compelling reasons for an inclusive, holistic approach are:

• It gives parents an effective way to address the realities of their final years with the people they love. They can get a clear understanding about how they will be cared for under various scenarios. More than anyone, children are the most likely people to ease the weight felt by parents in dealing with the transition. Family meetings can prepare children for what lies ahead during the parents’ remaining years.
  
  
• Families become stronger when they gather together with assistance to reflect and discuss what it means to them to be a family, what is most important to them as a family, what their values are, and how they can help one another to achieve their individual and collective goals. These conversations frequently lead to compelling discussions about the role of money in personal happiness and the family members’ commitment to one another, their communities, and society. They occasionally lead to establishing trusts and foundations for supporting philanthropic endeavors as a family.
  
  
• When leaving gifts for their children, parents usually want what is in their children’s best interests, and often, the best way of learning this is to hear directly from the children. Engaging in conversations with grown children can provide access to vital family knowledge of which neither parents nor their advisors may be aware. For example, some grown children do not need money and prefer that their parents pass it directly to their children. Other children might not want their parents to control when and how much money their children receive.
  
  
• Dialogues with adult children give parents an opportunity to explain their rationale for the intended distribution of assets and possessions, especially any unequal distributions to children, gifts to others, and philanthropic gifts. Because the children must live with their parents’ decisions, it makes sense for parents to provide them with a foolproof way of understanding their rationales for those decisions.
  
  
• When parents share their plans with their grown children, it allows the grown children to plan their own careers and personal lives with more realistic information. This means children do not waste time guessing about their inheritance or planning for improbable eventualities. Withholding information creates a breeding ground for suspicion, misunderstanding, and even paranoid thinking; sharing information is an antidote for many ills that befall families during this period.
  
  
• Many problems that arise when settling estates appear to be financial (such as siblings’ vying for assets) but actually stem from unaddressed emotional and interpersonal issues.²⁹ One commentator estimated that as many as ninety percent of the problems siblings encounter after their parents die could have been eliminated if the parents had talked openly with their children about the estate plans.³⁰ By addressing underlying issues, talking openly, and eliminating surprises, family meetings can establish the expectation that siblings will deal openly and collaboratively with issues that arise after the parents have died.³¹
  
  
• When parents have ideas about leaving assets to their children jointly, or having some or all of their children co-manage trusts or other assets, sharing these ideas with their children gives the children an opportunity to voice their concerns about the wisdom of the ideas. This is critically important since the parents would essentially be making them partners. Once that information is shared and the children fully appreciate the long-term implications, they can have a hand in deciding if they actually want to be partners and how they should prepare for such a change in their relationship to one another.
  
  
• One final advantage for the family, which is also an advantage for the estate planner, is that carefully conducted family meetings ensure that there will be no surprises or hidden agendas after the parents die. The likelihood of conflict is decreased by obviating the need for children to deal with complicated and emotionally charged estate matters at a time when they are most vulnerable emotionally.

Questioning parents about their wishes and goals for themselves and their families, and helping them appreciate the potential downsides of not involving their adult children and the benefits of bringing children into the process can help parents feel ready to engage in a holistic estate planning process. Parents are likely to understand that their choices will have either a positive or negative effect on their family—the effect is unlikely to be neutral—and that engaging their grown children in the estate planning process increases the likelihood of a positive effect.

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27
EILEEN GALLO & JON GALLO, SILVER SPOON KIDS: HOW SUCCESSFUL PARENTS RAISE RESPONSIBLE CHILDREN, at xvii (2001).

28
See generally BARRY K. BAINES, ETHICAL WILLS: PUTTING YOUR VALUES ON PAPER (2002); RABBI JACK RIEMER, SO THAT YOUR VALUES LIVE ON—ETHICAL WILLS AND HOW TO PREPARE THEM (Jack Riener & Nathaniel Stampler eds., 1991) (providing examples of ethical wills drafted during different periods of civilization, from Biblical times to the Holocaust).

29
See generally DAN ROTTENBERG, THE INHERITORS HANDBOOK: A DEFINITIVE GUIDE FOR BENEFICIARIES (1999).

30 See id. at 17.

31
In an interview about the family meeting to discuss his parents’ estate, Arthur Sills, who now runs the Sills Family Foundation, explained, “It was another rung on the ladder of our family’s ability to talk about difficult issues. . . . We knew we were sitting in an unusual conversation.” The meeting took place with the help of a facilitator. The parents’ estate planning attorney was on hand to answer any questions the sons had. Arthur Sills credits that family meeting with making his two brothers and him even more capable of working through challenging interpersonal issues together later in life. He implied that, by holding that family meeting, his parents had raised the bar for all three of them. Telephone
Interview with Arthur Sills, President, Sills Family Foundation (Aug. 28, 2004)