How do I choose the best guardian for my children.

How do I choose the best guardian for my children. This one hits really close to home for me because my husband and I have three young children. And we want to make sure that if something happened to us, that we have selected the best guardian for them. We want to make sure that we've selected a guardian who essentially would near our parenting as we would.

You want to select someone who has a similar parenting philosophy and style on how they would discipline your children. That it's in line with what you believe. Their religion or spirituality decisions that they would make, you want those to be in line with your values. 

It's really important to think through parenting philosophy style, discipline, educational choices, extra curricular activities, that those are decisions that you really trust a potential guardian could make in light of what they know you would want. And to the extent that you actually let them know ahead of time what you would want. It really goes a long way to help your guardian honor you and raise your children just how you would.

We're talking about long term guardianship, who would actually raise your children. That's a separate question from short term guardianship, which is what happens in an emergency situation. But going back to the long term piece, what I like to caution you about considering, is assuming that the long term guardian if they have a lot of financial resources, or they're wealthy, just relying on the fact that they've got enough money to raise your children, as a good reason to choose them. 

I never suggest that finances in and of itself is the best reason to choose a guardian because ideally you will be leaving enough finances and support for your children to raise them and get them through high school and ultimately college and beyond. Versus having someone else foot that money and be the ones to support your children financially. 

It is a totally separate decision in terms of what is the best way to handle finances for children, and pay for their raising. Versus who really can raise them as closely aligned with what you would want in terms of how they're raised.