Be Prepared and Name a Guardian : Parenting: Who would take care of your kids if you couldn’t? The time to decide is now, while you are still here and able to consider all the details.

The worrisome question arose again as Lisa Harmon and her husband were preparing recently for a trip to San Francisco:

“I just started thinking, if something happened and we were away, what would happen to the kids,” said Harmon, 35, of Northport, N.Y., whose children are 3 and 5. “I don’t know.

“We think about this a lot, but we seem to get nowhere, because no one likes to think about mortality,” Harmon said. “It’s total avoidance.”

Harmon and her husband, Marc Offenbach, are far from alone.

Lawyers say 75% of Americans have no formally designated guardians for their children. Such parents potentially are leaving it up to a court in the event of their deaths to place their kids.

It is not an outcome many parents would relish. Nonetheless, parents continue to procrastinate in choosing a guardian, either because they find death to be an unappealing subject or because they cannot settle on an acceptable guardian, say attorneys and psychologists.

“None of us wants to embrace our own mortality,” said Sally L. Mattson, a psychologist in Brattleboro, Vt. “We don’t want to think about our children being without us.”

Nonetheless, she said, the process of choosing a guardian need not be daunting.

“You need to be aware that you need to make a good-enough decision, but not a perfect one,” Mattson said. “If you don’t make the decision, it’s left up to the court. And, often, if you don’t have immediate family that are appropriate, your kids will be in foster care.”

Considerations in choosing a guardian range from the relatively simple--Would the prospective family have enough room in their home for my kids? Do they live close enough so that my child wouldn’t have to uproot?--to the dismayingly complex--Would I upset members of my family if I chose a close friend for a guardian? What happens if we divorce? Would the guardians truly love my children and raise them as if they were their own?

*

Nonetheless, estate lawyers and other experts have developed some standard questions and suggestions to help make a difficult decision less onerous.

First, they say, draw up a will.

The document, which you and your attorney will keep on file in a safe place, should include language designating a guardian and, if possible, an alternate in case the primary designee becomes unable or unwilling to serve. In the event of a court contest, the designation is not legally binding. But judges typically side with the parents’ wishes.

Ralph M. Engel, a New York City attorney who specializes in estate planning, said that many people who consider their assets insubstantial ignore the writing of a will.

“If they have kids it can be a disaster,” Engel said. “If something happens to them, there is no decision as to who gets the child, and the two sides of the family can go to war with each other. The only loser is the child.”

Once you’ve settled on a guardian, decide whether that person will have charge over both the children and their estate, or whether you want a separate individual, called a trustee, for the money.

The simpler job usually is handling the children’s finances.

“The guardian of the person is the new parent--that’s the tough one,” Engel said.

But Engel also said that although parents frequently entrust both the children and their inheritance to a single guardian, “the fact that somebody is good to raise your kids doesn’t mean that someone is good to manage your money”--or vice versa.

“The first thing to keep in mind is that the guardian is concerned with the welfare of the minor’s person, as opposed to the minor’s trust estate,” said Eliot Kaplan, an estate attorney in White Plains, N.Y.

“You want to choose somebody who is able to be aware of a minor’s needs, and to make wise decisions on a minor’s behalf,” Kaplan said.

*

Steven Prye, a New York City attorney who writes an estate-planning column for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., said basic criteria for choosing a guardian include the age and health of the person or couple, whether they have children of a similar age, where they live and their religious preferences.

“The ideal guardian is a stable person who can give the child love and affection and who has the emotional and financial ability to raise the child,” Prye said.

“The most typical choice is family members,” he said. “Longtime friends are often possibilities.”

In practice, however, parents often become stuck at precisely this stage of the process as they weigh the relative merits, and deficiencies, of their potential replacements.

“The people that have the easiest time have close relatives whom they feel very connected with, and there is no question in their minds about guardianship,” Mattson said.

But when family members appear to be inappropriate, parents often shy away from naming friends. That is because of the implication that the relatives somehow came up short.

A 44-year-old Long Island woman whose children are 10 and 7 said she would like to choose as a guardian a couple in Philadelphia who, she believes, “have our values” about issues ranging from religion to education. But she can’t quite bring herself to make that choice, in part because of the reaction she fears from her immediate family.

“I’m not so comfortable with my children being raised by members of my family,” said the woman, a psychotherapist who asked not to be identified. But, she said, “part of me thinks this would hurt my family. I would feel I would hurt their feelings.”

Some make the choice of friends more easily.

Bill and Myra Feeney of Greenlawn, N.Y., had designated Bill Feeney’s brother and sister-in-law as guardians of their daughters, Molly, 9, and Rebecca, 5. But the two families have since had a falling out, and the Feeneys recently named as the new guardian a single mother with whom they are close.

“I felt she was more stable than my brother,” Bill Feeney, 45, said of the new guardian, who has a son, 13. “We chose her because she was basically the best mom you can imagine. She’s totally into her son.”

Attorneys suggest that parents who have chosen guardians also review their designation every few years.

“Friendships change, people move, people grow apart,” said Paul Horton, a law professor at the University of San Diego.

“Supposing you appoint your sister and brother-in-law, and your sister dies--would you want the brother-in-law to be the guardian?” asked Ira H. Lustgarten, an estate specialist at Willkie, Farr & Gallagher in New York City.

*

Divorce of the parents also can throw open the guardianship issue all over again. One member of a couple, for instance, may no longer want his or her former in-law to remain the children’s guardian, Prye said.

Like so many disputes that come up during a divorce, “there’s really no good way to handle it,” Prye said, other than to attempt to negotiate new terms of guardianship.

To avoid another potentially unpleasant outcome--a divisive custody battle--estate attorneys say it is a good idea to encourage a relationship between the child and his or her guardian.

The ability to prove the existence of such a relationship is particularly valuable if others, especially family members, decide to contest the parents’ choice of a guardian.