When Shared Decisions Block a Child's Help: Parental Responsibility, Veto and High Conflict

Joint decision-making protects a child from one parent pushing the other out. It can also hand either parent a veto over help the child needs.

Parental responsibility is not only the right to decide about a child. It is, above all, a responsibility towards the child. That sounds obvious. In practice, when parents separate and stay in conflict, it becomes one of the hardest things for a legal system to get right.

This essay looks at two linked problems: what happens when shared decision-making turns into a veto, and how a system tells a child's real voice from the noise of an adult conflict. Czech law is the case study, but the questions apply almost anywhere.

When "joint" becomes "veto"

Imagine two children who need psychological help. One parent wants it to continue. The other refuses, saying the psychologist is biased, because her report to the court said the children are at risk.

The same pattern appears with schooling, healthcare and other significant decisions. One parent says no. The other can go to court. Legally, a solution exists. But the child waits in the meantime, and the child's time is not an adult's time.

What Czech law provides

The Czech Civil Code says two important things.

• Parental responsibility includes care for the child's health, their emotional, intellectual and moral development, and their protection.
• Parents exercise it by mutual agreement. If they cannot agree on a matter that is significant for the child, the court decides on the petition of one of them.

That is a necessary protection. It stops one parent from simply removing the other from decisions.

Czech law also already provides for suspending or limiting parental responsibility. Since 2026 it explicitly allows intervention where the exercise of parental responsibility threatens the child's emotional or psychological development and the threat cannot be averted in any other way.

I am not saying that one parent's disagreement with a psychologist is a reason to limit their parental responsibility. It is not. My question is a different one.

Does the system have a fast enough mechanism for the situation in which the exercise of parental responsibility stops protecting the child and starts blocking the help the child needs?

Some questions worth asking in any jurisdiction:

• Can a court decide a single, time-sensitive issue such as ongoing therapy through a quick interim decision, without reopening the whole custody arrangement?
• Who can ask for it, and how fast must the court respond?
• While the decision is pending, is the help the child already has allowed to continue?

High conflict lives in the child

"The parents are in conflict." That sounds like a problem between two adults. But a high-conflict dispute does not live only between the parents. The child lives in it.

They hear what one parent says about the other. They sense which answer each of them expects. Sometimes they feel they must protect one parent, or choose a side. Sometimes they gradually lose not only a relationship with one parent but also with siblings, grandparents and other people who mattered to them.

Be careful with the word "manipulation"

In custody disputes, almost everyone uses it against almost everyone. The concrete questions are more useful:

• Is the child being drawn into the adults' conflict?
• Are they receiving information that, at their age, they should not have to carry?
• Are they under pressure to reject the other parent?
• Are they punished, perhaps emotionally, for loving the other part of their family?
• Is their opinion really their own?

And above all: what is all of this doing to the child?

Four things to tell apart

Professionals need to distinguish between:

• the child's genuine opinion,
• the child's reaction to their own experience,
• a loyalty conflict,
• and demonstrably harmful influence by an adult.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child treats the child's best interests (Article 3) and the child's right to be heard (Article 12) as complementary. Hearing a child is essential. But hearing is not the same as treating every statement as a settled preference, and it is not the same as dismissing every refusal as influence. The two errors look different and harm children equally.

The extreme end of the spectrum

On 9 September 2026 the Czech Constitutional Court issued a strong decision. In a case where the courts had found proven manipulative behaviour by one parent and damage to the child's psychosocial development, it allowed, as a last resort, even placing the child in the neutral environment of institutional care. It stressed that this is the final option, to be used only if there is no milder measure.

That decision is extreme precisely because it shows how serious the problem can be. It should not lead us to label every refusal of a parent as manipulation. Quite the opposite: it makes careful distinctions more important.

What the goal is

The goal cannot be to "save a parent's right." Nor to "punish the other parent."

The goal is to protect the child's psychological development, and their right to form their own relationships without a war between adults.