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How the Sitcom “black-ish” Almost Gets Choosing a Guardian for Your Kids Right

By August 9, 2016 March 31st, 2021 No Comments

Alan Wu on FlickrThe dearth of balmy summer evenings in Seattle this year has driven me indoors to chill with television shows I missed earlier in the year. Before diving down the “Mr. Robot” rabbithole, I caught up with a few episodes of the brilliantly hilarious ABC family sitcom “black-ish.” I love this show. It is so very smart in how it addresses race and class in the context of the ridiculousness of family life, and manages to veer between edgy and wholesome, serious and silly. And it’s funny.  In a profile of the show’s creator, Kenya Barris, in the New Yorker, writer Emily Nussbaum delves into how Barris managed to pull off the powerful “Hope” episode about police brutality. I highly recommend both watching the episode and reading Nussbaum’s article.

This post isn’t about “Hope”, though. It is about “The Leftovers” episode, a surprisingly frothy episode in which Johnson family parents Dre and Bow grapple with deciding who to nominate to serve as a guardian and raise their kids if something happens to both of them. The episode gets a lot right. It portrays the parents working through tensions with one another when they find flaws in nominating each of their children’s grandparents as guardian; it involves discussions of the qualities that are most important to them in choosing the person who would be responsible for raising their children; and it provides an all-too-frequent scenario of parents who have put off making this type of estate planning decision for far too long – their oldest daughter, Zoey, is nearly an adult.

Indeed – spoiler alert – Dre and Bow have an epiphany that Zoey is their ideal guardian. Zoey is a vain teenager frequently found focused on her phone, but her parents realize that she is also responsible, shares their values and is the ideal surrogate parent. As a sitcom plot, it works. As reality, there’s just one tiny issue that is kind of a big deal: Zoey is almost an adult. In the eyes of the law, she is still a child until she attains the age of 18 and would herself need a guardian until that happens.

What should the Johnsons have done? Zoey might be the ideal choice, but she is not qualified to serve as a guardian until she is 18. As both parents are relatively young and healthy, and Zoey will be qualified to serve as guardian in a couple years, they could have nominated an alternate guardian. As Stacey wrote in an earlier blog post about choosing a guardian, it is important to not only nominate a guardian for your children, but to nominate alternates who could serve should your first choice be unable or unwilling to do so.

Photo credit: Alan Wu on Flickr

This post is for informational purposes and does not contain or convey legal advice. The information herein should not be used or relied upon in regard to any particular facts or circumstances without first consulting with an attorney.

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