Review each person’s actual status and documents. The principal’s cumulative analysis does not replace an individual assessment of dependent stay or intended activities.
Coordinate the family timeline with reviewed status
Qualifying L spouses are employment authorized incident to status with appropriate documentation. Children gain no work permission solely through L dependent status. Have expiry and continued-work questions assessed rather than assuming a future petition resolves them automatically.
Work through each person separately and in a fixed order: current status and its expiry, the documents that establish it, then what that person intends to do next. Proceeding this way catches the case where a dependent’s authorized stay ends before the principal’s, which is common enough to be worth checking rather than assuming. A qualifying L spouse is employment authorized incident to status with appropriate documentation; children gain no work permission solely through L dependent status, and a part-time job offered to a teenager is not an exception to that.
Before the household commits to anything that presumes continuity — a lease, a school year, an employment contract for the spouse — confirm which document each person would rely on to prove their permission on the day it is questioned, and when that document expires. What has to be true before the family travels comes down to this: each person’s own file answers its own questions.