Managing Child Care While Dealing With COVID-19: Tips For Single Parents – Part 1
Even though there are now vaccines for the CORONA virus and the number of new cases is on the decline, becoming infected is still a very real possibility. For parents who suffer from any debilitating illness, it can be a challenge to navigate your parenting responsibilities while trying to recover.
This is especially true for single parents with limited outside child-care options. However, plenty of single parents have faced the same challenge and successfully recovered while raising their young children. Fortunately, you can learn from their experiences, ask for support, and take steps to prepare for managing your illness and your role as a parent.
Stay Calm
Getting diagnosed with COVID-19 can be terrifying. While this is true for anyone, it is even more so for single parents with young children. Do your best not to freak out. Remember, most people who contract COVID-19 don’t experience serious complications. In fact, many never even develop any symptoms at all. Further, while it may be extremely scary to test positive, letting yourself become overly stressed is only going to make you feel worse and frighten your children.
Children who do contract the virus typically fare even better than adults. For those kids who do become sick, the symptoms are often fairly minor, with many children just experiencing a sore throat and some diarrhea.
If you do contract COVID-19 and develop symptoms, preparing for the illness beforehand can give peace of mind. It can also greatly improve your chances for recovery, as well as enable you to be a more effective parent. Before we get to the preparation for reducing contagion, dealing with symptoms, and other practical issues related to the virus, we’ll first address some of the legal planning you should have in place.
Legal Issues For Parents Dealing With COVID-19
As a parent, your number-one planning priority is to name legal guardians to care for your children should anything happen to you. With the ongoing pandemic, this responsibility is even more vital and urgent.
Name legal guardians for your kids: Go to this free website right now to name guardians for your children in a legal document. You can then have your legal document reviewed by us, as your local Personal Family Lawyer®. When we review your legal document, we will look for six common mistakes parents make when naming legal guardians to ensure you haven’t made any of these errors. IF you have, those mistakes can easily fix any mistakes you may have made.
If you are having a difficult time deciding who to name as legal guardians for your children, we can help you make the right decision.
Officially answering the question of who will care for your kids if you are unable to is one of the best things you can do right now to prepare for COVID-19 or any potential illness that can leave you in a vegetative state. Taking this simple action is a concrete step you can take to protect your kids during this frightening time. Plus, knowing that your kids will be cared for by the people you would want to look after them in the event you require hospitalization or pass away from the virus will be a huge relief, allowing you to focus on your recovery.
Create advance healthcare directives: The second-most urgent planning priority for all adults is to create the proper legal documents to assist medical providers in better coordinating your care should you become hospitalized and/or incapacitated by the virus. The documents which are necessary for this purpose are a medical power of attorney and a living will.
A medical power of attorney and living will are both advance healthcare directives that work together to help describe your wishes for medical treatment and end-of-life care in the event you become incapacitated. Additionally, in light of Covid-19, even those who have already created these documents should revisit them to ensure they are up-to-date and address specific scenarios related to the coronavirus.
While all adults over age 18 should put these documents in place, if you are over age 60 or have a chronic underlying health condition, the need is particularly urgent. Contact us right away if you or anyone in your family needs to have these documents created.
For an in-depth explanation of what advance directives are, how they work, and the specific details that you need to address in these documents for COVID-19, you can read our previous blog post, COVID-19 Highlights Critical Need for Advance Healthcare Directives.
Next week, in part two of this series, we’ll discuss measures that single parents who have tested positive for COVID-19 can take to reduce passing the virus on to their children as well as outlining steps for enhancing your ability to recover from the illness.
This article is a service of Levi L. Alexander, Personal Family Lawyer®. We do not just draft documents. We help to ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. This is why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session™. During this session, you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before and make all the best choices for the people you love. You can begin by calling our office to schedule a Family Wealth Planning Session and mention this article to find out how to get this $750 session for free.
