Money Matters: When is it time for "the chat?"

During the last few years of my mother's life, a visit to her (she lived in another city, an airplane ride away) generally meant a peek at a little list she kept.  She wanted me to know what her assets were and where--a CD at this bank, a safe deposit key at another one.  I came to think of it as "The Chat."
It gave me the creeps.

Yet, I've started wondering whether paterfamilias and I ought to be having "the chat" with our offspring. We're believers in share-it-now, help-them-when-they-need-it. But we're also husbanding what we'll need for an independent and comfortable retirement.  We're not [presumably] close to closing in on the end of our life lines, but you never know what's coming down the pike.

So we're asking ourselves, when is the best time to give our grown children a rundown on the assets we'll be leaving behind for them? It's a touchy issue but we don't want them to have to scramble around to assemble our assets. Maybe the sooner we do it--when we're in the pink of health and robust in appetite for life--is the better time. Not so creepy. Just the facts.

I've just developed a lot more empathy for my mother and The Chat.