What is “fair and reasonable”? Norms and strategies guiding the distribution of assets by testators who have an adult child with intellectual disability

ABSTRACT

Background: Parents making a will most commonly distribute assets evenly to adult children. How parents of an adult child with an intellectual disability use wills to plan for future care and support has had limited policy, practice and research attention.

Method: This research reports on the perceptions of 20 parents regarding the impact of the needs of their child with disability on estate planning. The participants were purposively recruited and interviewed during 2014–15.

Results: Participants were more likely to consider equity of outcomes for their children taking into account retaining access to state services. They report difficulties in future planning in the context of changing service systems and limited specialised advice.

Conclusions: Judgements about what is fair and reasonable in distributing assets reflect differing views of need and entitlement within families. Such families would benefit from specialised advice and support in estate planning, particularly given the changing context.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual disability
• families
• wills
• inheritance

Acknowledgements

This research was supported under the Australian Research Council's Linkage Projects Funding scheme (Project number: LP110200891) and contributions from our Industry Partners the Public Trustees of Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and the Australia Capital Territory, State Trustees of Victoria and New South Wales Trustee and Guardian. The authors would like to thank Dr. Josephine Yellowlees for completing all of the interviews and the initial analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number LP110200891].