Dependent status is tied to the principal's, so a change or an ending affects the whole household. An eligible spouse in valid L-2S status is employment authorized incident to status; children under 21 may hold L-2 but are not work authorized by it, and a child approaching 21 raises its own timing question.
Give the household the same runway
A spouse working under L-2S has an employer and colleagues who need planning too, and children may be midway through a school stage. Bring the family's dates into the same chronology: each person's status, each person's documents, and any age or school milestone falling in the relevant window. Where a household decision would be hard to reverse, place it after the point where counsel has read the record.
Add one further item to that household chronology: what each person's own record contains, not merely their dates. A spouse who has held more than one status, a child who spent a year studying elsewhere, a period when someone travelled separately — each is part of the household's history and each may matter when options are being weighed. Assemble every person's documents to the same standard as the principal's rather than treating the family as an appendix to one file.
Hypothetical example: a household reconstructing its position finds the spouse's record includes a period in a different classification some years earlier, which turns out to be relevant to the options available and would not have surfaced from a chronology that tracked only the principal.