The Phone Call Every Parent Dreads
Imagine your 25-year-old is in a car accident on their way home from work. They’re rushed to the hospital, unconscious. You race to the ER, and the nurse stops you at the door. You can’t get information about their condition. You can’t speak with their doctors. You can’t make decisions about their care. You are, legally speaking, a stranger.
This isn’t a rare edge case. It happens to families every single day, and it catches parents completely off guard. Most people assume that being someone’s parent automatically gives you the right to step in when something goes wrong. It doesn’t. The moment your child turned 18, they became a legal adult, and the law treats them exactly the same as it would treat any other adult you have no relationship with. Blood doesn’t create legal authority. A Power of Attorney does.
The good news is that this is one of the simplest, least expensive legal problems to solve — if you solve it before you need it.
What a Power of Attorney Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)
A Power of Attorney is a legal document where one person (the principal) gives another person (the agent) the authority to act on their behalf. Depending on how it’s written, that authority can cover medical decisions, financial matters, or both. In Michigan, these are typically split into two separate documents: a Healthcare Power of Attorney (sometimes called a Patient Advocate Designation) and a Financial Power of Attorney.
A Healthcare Power of Attorney lets your designated agent make medical decisions if you’re unconscious, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to speak for yourself. It can address things like which treatments you consent to, whether you want to be resuscitated, and where you receive care. Without this document, hospitals follow a legally defined hierarchy of who can speak for a patient, and that process can be slow, contested, and limited in ways that don’t reflect what the patient would actually want.
A Financial Power of Attorney covers everything else: paying bills, managing bank accounts, dealing with landlords or employers, filing taxes, handling student loans, and any number of financial tasks that don’t stop just because someone is in the hospital. Even a short-term medical crisis can create financial chaos if no one has the authority to keep things running.
What a Power of Attorney is NOT is a takeover of someone’s life. Your 25-year-old remains in full control of their own affairs. The agent only has authority to act when it’s actually needed, and a well-drafted document includes protections that keep that authority appropriately scoped. This isn’t about parents controlling their adult children. It’s about having a plan for the moments when your child genuinely can’t speak for themselves.
Why “They Own Nothing” Is the Wrong Reason to Wait
The most common reason parents don’t push for this is the assumption that Estate Planning is about assets. If your kid has no house, no investments, and maybe $400 in a checking account, why would they need legal documents? Because a Power of Attorney isn’t about what your child owns. It’s about what could happen to them.
Think about the financial picture of a typical 25-year-old. They likely have a job, which means a paycheck. They have an apartment, which means a lease and a landlord. They probably have student loans, a car payment, a cell phone plan, and a handful of subscriptions. If they end up in the hospital for two weeks, all of those things keep ticking. Bills come due. Direct deposit may not cover what it needs to. An employer might need paperwork completed. If no one has legal authority to manage these things, the mess that accumulates can follow your child for months after they recover.
There’s also the healthcare side, which has nothing to do with assets at all. A young person can have a serious accident, a sudden illness, a mental health crisis that requires hospitalization, or complications from a routine procedure. None of those scenarios require owning property. They just require being a human being in a body that sometimes fails unexpectedly. The Power of Attorney exists for that reality.
HIPAA: The Wall Between You and Information About Your Own Child
Even if a hospital were willing to let you make decisions in a crisis, there’s another layer of the problem: HIPAA. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act restricts who can receive a patient’s medical information, and your adult child’s doctors are legally prohibited from talking to you without your child’s explicit authorization.
This means that even in a situation where your child is awake and alert but overwhelmed, you might not be able to get a clear picture of what’s happening medically unless they’ve signed a HIPAA release naming you. And if they’re unconscious or unable to communicate, you’re essentially left asking questions that doctors and nurses aren’t allowed to answer.
A Healthcare Power of Attorney, paired with a HIPAA release, solves this. It gives you access to information and decision-making authority in a way that’s legally recognized by healthcare providers. Without it, you may find yourself advocating for your child from behind a wall of privacy regulations that were designed to protect patients, but that in this context are working against your family.
The College Student Situation
This becomes especially urgent if your young adult is in college, particularly out of state. If your 19-year-old at Michigan State has a medical emergency, you’re navigating a hospital system in a different city, talking to staff who have no relationship with your family, and possibly dealing with a school administration that also can’t share information with you due to FERPA (the educational equivalent of HIPAA).
Parents of college students often don’t realize they’ve lost legal access to their child’s records, health information, and financial accounts the moment their child turned 18, regardless of who’s paying tuition. This is one of the things that catches families off guard most often during freshman year. A Power of Attorney and a HIPAA release drafted before your child leaves for school is one of the most practical things you can do before drop-off day.
What Happens If There’s No Document in Place
If your adult child is incapacitated and there’s no Power of Attorney, Michigan law provides a process called guardianship and conservatorship. A guardian makes personal and medical decisions; a conservator handles finances. To obtain either, you have to go to probate court, file a petition, have your child evaluated, attend hearings, and be formally appointed by a judge. This process takes time, costs money, and involves the court system in a situation that is already emotionally overwhelming.
Even in the best-case scenario, a guardianship proceeding can take weeks. In a medical crisis, weeks is not a timeline that works. Decisions may need to be made in hours or days. By the time you have court authority, the critical window may have already passed, and you may have spent thousands of dollars in legal fees to get there.
A Power of Attorney costs a fraction of what guardianship costs, takes far less time to put in place, and gives your family the same basic capability without the court involvement. It is one of the clearest examples of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure.
How to Actually Get This Done
The practical reality is that most 25-year-olds are not going to call an Estate Planning attorney on their own. They’re busy, they feel invincible, and thinking about incapacity planning isn’t exactly how they want to spend a Tuesday evening. This is usually a conversation that starts with a parent.
The framing matters. This isn’t about controlling your child or preparing for death. It’s about making sure that if something unexpected happens, you can actually help them. Most young adults, when they understand what the documents actually do, are willing to sign them. The resistance usually comes from misunderstanding what they’re agreeing to.
When you’re ready to move forward, your young adult will work with an attorney to draft documents that reflect their actual wishes. They’ll name an agent (often a parent, sometimes a sibling, sometimes a close friend), and they can place whatever limitations they want on that authority. The documents are signed, notarized, and kept somewhere accessible. In Michigan, the Healthcare Power of Attorney should also be given to any healthcare providers your child sees regularly.
It’s worth doing this as a family. Some firms, including ours, work with families to get these documents done efficiently for young adults who are heading to college or entering their independent adult lives. The conversation doesn’t have to be heavy or morbid. It can simply be part of setting your child up well for adulthood.
One More Thing Worth Mentioning
While you’re having this conversation, it’s a good time to talk about a basic Will as well. Even if your 25-year-old has minimal assets, they may have personal property that matters to them, and if they were to die without a Will, Michigan’s intestacy laws decide who gets everything. If they’re unmarried with no children, that means their assets go to their parents equally. That may be exactly what they’d want, or it may not be. They also can’t use their Will to leave something specific to a friend, a partner they’re not married to, or a cause they care about. A Will lets them make those choices themselves rather than leaving it to a default the state created.
For most young adults, a simple Will and Power of Attorney package is genuinely affordable and can be done in a single focused appointment. It’s not a major legal undertaking. It’s a couple of hours and a set of documents that will sit quietly in a drawer, hopefully never needed urgently, but there if life doesn’t go as planned.
Your 25-year-old may own nothing. But they have a life that matters, a body that can be injured, and people who love them and would want to help if something went wrong. That’s more than enough reason to have these documents in place.
