McKenzie Friend and Founder of Everyman Justice
Sponsored post by Everyman Justice.
Every summer, family courts see an increase in applications about children travelling abroad. On paper, these are disputes about flights, passports and dates. Sit in on enough of them, or sit across the table from enough parents preparing for one, and you notice something else. The holiday is rarely the thing anyone is actually angry about.
The argument that isn’t really about Spain
Nobody falls out over a week in Marbella. What they fall out over is what the request represents. A parent who feels shut out of decisions reads “can I take them abroad” as one more thing being decided without them. A parent who has spent two years being doubted and second-guessed reads “I need to know everything about this trip” as control dressed up as concern. By the time anyone mentions a Specific Issue Order, the holiday has become the battlefield for an argument that started months, sometimes years, earlier.
Better wording in a parenting plan won’t repair a trust problem. It will just move the argument to the next clause.
Consent as the last lever left
Here’s the part that legal guidance doesn’t always capture. After separation, a lot of parents lose most of the levers they used to have — they don’t decide the school run, the bedtime, the new partner who’s now around the kids. Consent to travel is often one of the only decisions left where their “no” still has weight. That makes it tempting to use, consciously or not, as leverage rather than as a genuine judgment about the child’s welfare. Withholding agreement can become less about the destination and more about being the one who still gets a say.
This is uncomfortable to write because it cuts both ways. Sometimes “I’m not comfortable with this” is a legitimate safeguarding instinct — a new partner nobody’s met, a country with weak return mechanisms, a parent with a pattern of not bringing children back on time. Sometimes it’s a respectable-sounding excuse for punishing an ex by making something they want harder to get. The two can look identical from the outside, and most parents convince themselves they’re the first kind even when they’re behaving like the second.
Booking first, asking later
The other recurring pattern: flights and accommodation get paid for before the other parent is even consulted. Sometimes that’s naivety — one parent genuinely assumes consent isn’t really in question. Sometimes it’s strategic — book it, tell the kids, then any refusal looks unreasonable and costly. Either way it backfires. Once money is spent, “let’s discuss this” turns into “you’re trying to ruin this,” and a conversation that could have taken five minutes becomes a standoff.
The irony is that most parents would never book a holiday with friends or extended family before checking everyone was available. Yet after separation, many make that assumption with the one person whose agreement may matter most. What feels like confidence to one parent often feels like exclusion to the other.
Too often, family courts are asked to decide questions that, in healthier co-parenting relationships, would never reach a judge.
What the court is actually weighing
Parents going into these applications often frame it, even to themselves, as “who deserves this holiday.” The court isn’t asking that question. It’s asking what serves the child’s welfare, and a parent who arrives showing they tried to communicate, gave reasonable notice, and shared a full itinerary is in a different position to one who books first and asks forgiveness later. The court is less interested in who “wins” the argument than in whether the proposed arrangements genuinely promote the child’s welfare. Parents who can show they communicated early, shared information and acted reasonably are usually in a much stronger position than those who created unnecessary conflict.
The children are listening more than anyone realises
Kids pick up far more than parents think. They hear “we’ll see,” they hear a tense phone call, and they fill in the blanks themselves — usually with something worse than the truth. A holiday that should be something to look forward to becomes something to be anxious about, and the child ends up carrying a dispute that was never theirs to carry.
What actually prevents this
None of this means every refusal is unreasonable. There are cases where concerns about abduction, safeguarding, or a parent’s previous behaviour make court involvement entirely appropriate. The challenge is recognising the difference between a genuine risk and a conflict that has simply found a new subject.
Not a longer clause in a Child Arrangements Order. A conversation that happens before anything is booked, where the request is just a request — not an announcement, not a fait accompli. Most of these cases could have been resolved with one calm exchange of information six months earlier. By the time it reaches court, it is rarely just a holiday dispute anymore. It is a trust dispute that happens to involve a holiday. No court order can repair that. It can only decide what happens next. The real challenge is not deciding where a child spends two weeks in August. It is helping parents make the next ten years of decisions without needing a judge every time.
Read more articles by Gergely Fried
About Gergely Fried
Gergely Fried is a McKenzie Friend, author, and the founder of Everyman Justice. With a background in education and business, and personal experience of child arrangements proceedings, he supports parents navigating the UK family court system with calm, practical guidance and emotional insight. His work focuses on clarity, emotional understanding, and reducing unnecessary conflict, always with the child’s wellbeing at the centre.
His book, Conflict by Design, guides parents step by step through child arrangements proceedings using a realistic case narrative, explaining what to expect in clear, accessible language rather than legal or academic jargon.
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