Now that you've dealt with your own estate, it's time to take a quiet role in your children's estate planning. It's the smart parent who sits each adult child down and explains the need for estate planning. If necessary, some parents pay the legal bills in order to ensure the planning is handled properly.

You don't have to know what is in your child's legal documents; you just want to make sure that they have the correct ones. As each of your children encounters a major life event (buying a house, getting married or divorced, or having a child), you should gently remind them to review their estate planning. You need to plant that seed of knowledge that an estate review is required.

Every adult needs a will, a durable power of attorney and a health care proxy. One common problem: If your child dies without a will, that child's assets may end up bouncing back to you and then be hit by estate taxes upon your death. Even though your children may be healthy now, an automobile accident may render one of them incapable of making medical and financial decisions, so both a durable power and a health care proxy are critical for each of your adult children.

If you have substantial assets, you need a thorough intergenerational estate plan to minimize estate taxes and make sure that all of the options available to you (trusts, gifting, and so on) are used to minimize family assets as they pass through the generations.

The life insurance market for college students is a big one and agents love to sell students permanent life insurance policies (usually with premiums that start out low and step up substantially over a period of years). An agent will often use the argument that now that the student is an adult, he should be able to make his own decisions without your interference.

College students do not need permanent life insurance. They need to be saving for the future and working on paying off college loans. With so many recent college graduates earning their keep through waitressing and other menial jobs, these policies are often paid for by the allowance or other money you give your child. When your child graduates and the allowance stops, the policies lapse. Of course, your child had the insurance coverage in the meantime, but the premiums have now been wasted.

Most families don't need sophisticated intergenerational estate planning, unless they have estates worth millions. However, as a parent, you do have the responsibility of continuing to advise your adult child of the need for estate reviews and initial estate planning, where appropriate.

Even though your child has become an adult, you never stop being a parent. Hopefully you can move into the role of trusted adviser instead of dictator.