How do I provide for my spouse without disinheriting my children?

In a second marriage the two goals genuinely compete, and a plan that does not choose between them chooses by accident.

In a first marriage this question mostly answers itself: everything to the survivor, then to the children, and the children are the same children. In a second marriage the two goals actually compete, and a plan that does not decide between them decides anyway — usually in favor of whoever outlives the other.

The failure mode

Each spouse leaves everything outright to the survivor, trusting that the survivor will pass it on to both sets of children. The survivor then remarries, or has a falling out, or simply writes a new plan naming only their own children. Nothing improper has happened. An outright gift is outright, and the first spouse's children receive nothing.

What a plan can do instead

The usual answer separates the right to use property from the right to receive it.

• An occupancy provision. The survivor may live in the house for life, or until they remarry or move into care, after which it passes to the children of the first marriage. The survivor keeps the home. The children keep the house.
• A share that locks on the first death. Each spouse's own property passes into a trust the survivor cannot rewrite. The survivor may draw income from it, and sometimes principal for health and support, but cannot redirect where it ultimately goes.
• Something now rather than everything later. A defined gift to the children of the first marriage on the first death, with the balance to the survivor, sometimes settles the question better than any structure.

Keep the property records straight

California distinguishes separate property from community property, and in a second marriage that distinction carries most of the weight. Assets brought into the marriage, commingled into a joint account, then used to improve a jointly held house are a genuinely hard problem afterwards and a simple one now.

The part that is not drafting

Say it out loud while everyone is alive. The families that come apart are almost never the ones where the plan was unusual. They are the ones where four adult children read the outcome for the first time in a lawyer's office and had to guess at the reason.