Keeping children alive persistiently, intelligently

[Hercynium]

Magnanimous Monks, myriad musings mottle my moody mind. Maybe many mighty mentors might minister me memorable motions mending my malady? (I've been waiting to post that for months - alliteration is dorky but *fun!*) :)

OK, here's what I came for:

I have a program that forks off a pile of long-running children. Actually, the child processes should probably *never* return or die, in normal operation.

The code I've already written (simplified version below in the readmore section) simply reports info about dead children to a log, but now I need to do more...

The calls to fork are done inside a loop that looks like this:

my %child_info;
foreach my $params (@params_for_children)
{
    if ( my $pid = fork() ) 
    {
        $child_info{$pid} = $params;
    }
    else 
    {
        do_childish_things($params);
        croak "Child fork exited - should never happen\n";
    }
}

while ( my $pid = wait() ) 
{
    last if $pid = -1;
    my $exit_status = $?;
    report_dead_child($pid, $exit_status, $child_info{$pid});
}

Generally, this works very well, but there are some things I need to add and I'm somewhat uncertain about how I would best go about it.

SO... I need advice with the following requirements:

• If a child dies, a new one needs to be spawned, with the same parameters as it's predecessor, but not immediately - there should be about a 1 min delay.
• If a child dies twice within a short period (say 5 min) it should be restarted after a longer (say 10 min) delay.
• If a child dies X number of times, the parent should do some pre-defined action (like emailing me) and give up on that child.
• These delays should not cause the parent to miss opportunities to revive other dead children
• If the parent is terminated, all the children need to die with it.

My main question is this:

Is the code above a bad way for me to do this?
and,
Should I continue writing my own solution(s) or is there a robust CPAN module that will do this for me with less hassle?