Writing a Letter of Intent for Your Child's Future

Who actually reads it, and when

Picture the realistic scenarios rather than the worst one. A grandparent taking over for two weeks while you are in the hospital. A sibling stepping in decades from now. A trustee deciding whether a request is reasonable. A new caregiver on their first morning.

None of them will read a fifty-page document cover to cover on the day they need it. Write so the first two pages are enough to get through a day, and the rest is there when there is time.

Start with the day

Not the diagnosis. The day. This is the section people skip and the section that gets used first.

• Morning, in order. What time, what wakes them, what happens first, what cannot happen first.
• Food. What they eat, what they will not, textures that are a problem, how food is presented, allergies and the difference between an allergy and a refusal.
• Communication. How they tell you they are hurting, hungry, overwhelmed, or done. Include the signs that are easy to misread as behaviour.
• Regulation. What calms them and what escalates. Be specific. "Music helps" is not usable. "The same album, low, from the kitchen speaker, not headphones" is.
• Sleep. The routine, the objects, what happens if it is interrupted.
• Bathroom and hygiene, in whatever detail is real, written plainly. Nobody reading this is embarrassed.

Then the picture around the day

Medical: diagnoses, medications with doses and what each is for, allergies, every doctor and specialist with a phone number, the pharmacy, the equipment and who services it, and what a bad day looks like versus an emergency.

Education and services: current school and program, the case manager, what the IEP promises and what is actually delivered, the therapies and who delivers them, what has worked, and what was tried and failed. The failures save the next person a year.

The people: who knows your child well, who is safe, who is not, siblings and what each relationship is like, and the friends or staff who matter.

Say what you want, plainly

This is the part only you can write, and it is the part families say they most wish they had.

Where should your child live, and what would make that decision change. What does a good week look like. What work or activity matters to them. What are your hopes, in ordinary words. What would you not want, and why. Religion, traditions, and the things that would feel like a loss if they quietly stopped happening.

Write it the way you would say it out loud to someone you trust. Formality helps nobody here.

Where it fits with the legal documents

The letter of intent sits alongside the rest of getting your affairs in order, never inside it. It has no binding force, cannot direct money, and cannot appoint anyone.

The instruments that do carry legal weight are a different conversation with an attorney who works in this area, and the choices there can affect benefit eligibility in ways that are easy to get wrong. That is worth paid advice.

What the letter does is make those instruments usable. A trustee holding money and no context makes worse decisions than a trustee holding the same money and forty pages describing the person it is for.

Make it a document that survives you being busy

The most common failure is not a bad letter. It is a good letter written once, in a burst, and never touched again, describing a child who has since changed schools twice.

Date every version. Put the date on the first page where a reader will see it. Pick one time a year that already exists in your calendar, such as the week after the annual school meeting, and re-read it then. Most years you will change three lines.

Then tell people it exists and where it is. A letter nobody can find on the day they need it did not get written.

Common questions