Alan Lakey: When should child cover be included?

In recent years a number of insurers have refined their critical illness plans so that children's cover is optional. Guardian has gone a stage further and allowed a choice of sum insured between £10,000 and £100,000. There is a clear logic to this approach inasmuch as those clients without eligible children have been subsidising those with children. As a result, the cost of children's cover had been suppressed because there was no danger of anti-selection. Simultaneously there has been a concerted move by most quality insurers to cover children from birth and also to extend cover by i...