Your Place or Mine? - Addressing the Caretaker Child Conundrum.
March 13, 2006
Gina M. Barry, Esquire
When an aging parent needs assistance to continue to live at home, many children opt to provide the needed care personally. Often, the parent will not agree to hire health care professionals to provide care due to their inability to appreciate the decline in their ability to live independently. Occasionally, the parent has concerns regarding their privacy or safety, and the only caregiver they will trust is their child. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the decision to provide care at home, the caretaker child arrangement conjures up a variety of legal issues.
A caretaker child arrangement begins when either the parent begins residing with the child in the child’s home or the child begins residing, or continues to reside, with the parent in the parent’s home, and the child provides the care similar to that of a board and care facility. When the child resides with, or begins to reside with the parent, often the home or other assets are transferred to the child as compensation for the care to be provided. When the parent begins residing with the child, normally, the parent’s home is sold, and the proceeds are used to build additional living space for the parent in the child’s home or are given to the child in exchange for the services the child agrees to provide for the parent.
In either situation, it is best to establish a care agreement. A care agreement is a contract between the parent and the child, and possibly the child’s spouse, in which the parent agrees to pay the child a monetary sum (in either a lump sum or on an ongoing basis) or to finance an improvement to the child’s home and the child agrees to care for the parent until either (1) the parent passes away or (2) is no longer able to perform two (2) of the activities of daily living, which include bathing, eating, dressing, transferring and toileting, whichever occurs first...
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by: Gina M. Barry
Prime
March 2006
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