[LinuxBender]

I like the idea of making notes that will be given to them at a later time. In my opinion the method of using email is adding fragility to your desired end goal. I believe your goal is to write letters that one day your children will read. Their email addresses may change, you might pass on, email accounts may be closed, email and cloud providers can go out of business. Speaking from experience, receiving communications from a loved one after they pass may have unintended psychological impact.

I am not a lawyer nor an estate planner but I believe at very least you would want to write the letters in a plain and simple format with date/time stamps and save them to multiple storage devices and also print them out from time to time. Have copies on site and in a bank deposit box. Detail in your will that these letters and USB drives must be given to all your children. There should be a cover page that explains what the letter are as to avoid confusion and to provide context. Plain text paper and text files will not be impacted by any of the numerous future time bugs.

Even better might be to create a living trust and have trust managers that will manually hand a copy of the content to your children in paper form at the same time your assets are distributed to them. The trust manager can have special instructions detailing how they are to reaffirm to the children how important it was to you that they read them. This is of course assuming you do not give them the letters before you pass. Apologies if that seemed a bit morbid.

[TrailMixRaisin]

Thanks for your input. I was thinking about getting a nice notebook and write letters into it. This method seemed a bit exclusive. I would like to invite grandparents, uncle, aunts etc. to add to the collection and would not want everybody to read the letters intended for the child. This would mean multiple notebooks and more management. While it would make the individual entry more meaningful (I assume you will think more before writing in a paper notebook) it might prevent me to add to it because my input does not seem meaningful enough.

So maybe "simple" mails that are stored by me or by a trusted third party are the best option. This again allows for contribution by third parties.

[haspoken]

Also raise your children to appreciate these sort of things so they will tend to them and perhaps start a family tradition. Keep in mind that the older they are, the more these will be appreciated.