My Best Friend Refuses to Be My Kid’s Designated Guardian

[beable]

Dear Care and Feeding,

I’m a single mom of an amazing 6-year-old boy. I asked my best friend if she would be his guardian if anything happened to me, and she said no.

She’s always said she didn’t want children, but she’s so great with my son that it really shocked me when she turned me down. I’m not close to my family, and I wouldn’t want them raising him because of our different values. My son’s father has never been in the picture; he would have absolutely no interest in raising my son, and I wouldn’t want him to. My friend has babysat my son and even had him for weekends, so I know how good she is with him and he loves her. She is a great person, but not conventionally attractive, and she’s never been in a relationship. I think she’s always said she didn’t want children because she knew that wasn’t in the cards for her. Maybe it has become such a habit that she actually believes it now. I think she would make a wonderful mother.

She’s the only person I want to raise my son if I’m not around, so I’m thinking I have two options: 1) Work on convincing her. She always comes around if I keep at her long enough. Or 2) Drop it for now, and express my preference in my will and leave a sealed letter detailing why she’s the only person I trust with my son. Which option is best? Or is there a better way to convince my friend that she should take my son? I’m not ill or dying, I just want this sorted out for my peace of mind.

—Please Be My Son’s Guardian

Dear Please,

Both of these “options” are absolutely appalling! Don’t attempt to pester or guilt your friend into changing her mind, and don’t just make her de facto guardian without her consent! NEITHER. NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. I think you might be working from a very strange definition of “friendship”—perhaps it’s worth stopping to ask yourself whether you’re really this person’s friend. Do you respect her and what she says? Do you genuinely value her as a person and care about what she wants? Or are you only interested in getting what you want from her?

I’m not even going to go into your bizarre, condescending theory that she only said she doesn’t want children because … she’s not conventionally attractive??? Instead, let us focus on the actual facts: Being good with your kid, babysitting him on the occasional weekend, even caring for and loving him, is not the same thing as being his parent. Your friend has told you that she doesn’t want to be your son’s guardian. Even if you are right that she would be a wonderful mother, that is not what she wants. You asked; she said no; that should be the end of it. Respect her, respect her decision, and make a different guardianship plan.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

The thing is, if LW's friend had written the letter ("I have a shitty condescending friend who negs me about my appearance and wants me to agree to take her kid if something happens to her despite my expressed desire to not raise a kid") my advice might be partially different. I really understand the necessity of making arrangements for one's kid to be cared for if something happens to one, more than I want to talk abut at the moment, but I can't agree that that necessity supercedes treating one's friends decently. ETA Or, to put it another way, there is a difference between an action being a good one to take and it being a good idea to browbeat someone into that action, and I think what you're interpreting as our callousness towards this child is actually our horror at the LW his mother.

[melannen]

I didn't mean to accuse other people in these comments of being callous about the kid's well-being, and I'm sorry it came off that way! Actually I think I might even be less sympathetic if LW's friend had written the letter - in that case I might be more likely to answer, "It's not your responsibility to figure out what happens to someone else's kid, and if you don't want to be their guardian, you are probably not the best person to be their guardian anyway." I am a little sympathetic to LW, but only a *little* sympathetic!

But I do think there is a tendency for people in some communities to jump in on defending the right to be childfree by choice when a situation is more complicated than that? Like, I think if this letter had said, "I want to ask my friend to be guardian of my child who she loves if I die, but she has told me she never wants to be a parent. It is disrespectful for me to ask anyway?" many people who commented here about not wanting kids might have answered differently.

The problem is that LW is being shitty to her friend in general, and in particular not respecting a no once given, and in particular particular considering unilaterally overriding that no, and I think I think we all agree on that. And I do see how that intersects specifically with how childfree people see their no's not respected all the time, and so people react to the childfree part in particular.

But also, even as a person who doesn't have kids myself, being flat told by a best friend I trusted that they would rather see my kid in foster care/with estranged family than take them in would hurt, that is fair to acknowledge, and if LW had been less shitty about their friendship in general (reiterate: LW is just plain a bad friend, all child issues aside) I might also focus on telling LW to work through that hurt in their own space (and away from their friend!)

[minoanmiss]

I thought a bit about how much of my life to mention in this comment, not least because I'm talking about my intersection with others' lives, but... to a first approximation I have been asked a similar question to the one LW asked her friend, and I gave the mostly-opposite mostly-yes answer. (To a first approximation. A lot of the details are different.) So I'm not coming at this from a particularly childfree perspective. (I'm more childless than childfree anyway, but again, complicated.) Although, that said, childfree people are besieged by society concerning their personal choices regarding children, and that should have stopped long agot.

For me, the thing is...

being flat told by a best friend I trusted that they would rather see my kid in foster care/with estranged family than take them in would hurt

has LW's friend actually or effectively said this to LW? I had said in the first version of my earlier comment that there's a range between abandoning the bereaved child and immediately assuming all the responsibilities of a parent, both proximate and ultimate. I don't think that LW's friend's refusal to do the latter actually constitutes the statement you've postulated here, or rather, that it has to. And I really don't think any of us were endorsing that statement.

(Also, as Lilysea points out, a willing volunteer foster parent could possibly be a better caretaker than an unequipped and resentful family friend. We can't guarantee, of course. )

[melannen]

Please don't feel obligated to reveal any of your life here! I think we're basically in agreement anyway, I'm just not communicating well, and this isn't a good topic to communicate badly at.

I am a person who IDs as childfree, but for a set of reasons that would mostly stop applying in a situation like the one in the letter, so I think I overreacted to the responses that implied no childfree person could or should be expected to do that (your response wasn't one of the ones I was looking sideways at, ftr) and I know quite a few people in my RL circles who've ended up taking in kids they didn't expect to, for all sorts of reasons.

We only have LW's side of the story, but LW gives the response as a flat no, so that seems to be how they are taking it? But that's why I suggested that if she does other work to be a better friend, and still decides to bring it back up, she starts by suggesting options other than becoming guardian.

But none of that negates that if someone doesn't want to take on a child, they shouldn't, and that should be the only answer they need to give, I think we are 100% in agreement with that.