Pulaski

It's fine for most parents traveling without the other parent most of the time, ... until it isn't, and then you'll really wish you'd bothered because you have just lost hundreds, of not several thousand, pounds/dollars/euro on airline tickets and perhaps an entire holiday.

It is fine to report that you never experienced a problem, but not really OK to extrapolate that into advice that nobody will ever experience a problem when traveling alone with their children.

Jerseygirl

Mr P.

holly_1948

Look, if we are talking about the USA, then as of the latest published statistics (2015) 40.3% of births are to unmarried mothers. There is no "other parent" in the vast majority of those cases. The putative father has long since gone and the mother typically has no desire to pursue him - even if she could find him or in some cases even knew who he was!
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unm...ildbearing.htm

BritInParis

None of which matters a jot if the father then decides he wishes to assert his parental rights after all and the next thing you know you are the subject of an Interpol Red Notice for international child abduction.

Pulaski

Your logic is flawed, almost totally. A father can, in most cases, exert his parental rights irrespective of whether he is married to the child's mother, and even if he has no custody or visitation rights or agreement. Being "a father" for the purposes of exerting parental rights under the Hague convention is largely a matter of biological fact not legal documentation of the birth and relationship between the parents.

In a small number of extreme cases even rapists have been ruled to have parental rights! Though I am not sure that the rulings have survived the appeal process.

holly_1948

You don't get it. In nearly 40% of births in the USA today there is no father. Only in the sense of a biological father, in most cases he is not even aware (and certainly does not care) that he has sired a child. The mother may not even know his first name.
No father means no father for all practical purposes.

I can see how men travelling with children might need paperwork in today's paranoid society. With or without an accompanying wife (how can an official know whether the wife is really the mother?). But mothers? Ridiculous, especially if unmarried and there is no father.

BritInParis

40% of children being born to unmarried mothers doesn't mean that 40% of mothers have no idea who the father of their children is. '1 in 4' of children in the US are being raised 'without a father' which might meet your definition of "no father for all practical purposes", but that doesn't mean there isn't one in the legal sense of the word, which is all that matters for the purposes of this discussion.

BritInParis

Case in point: http://britishexpats.com/forum/movin...-spain-902614/

mikelincs

There is ALWAYS a father, otherwise no child as we haven't yet got into cloning, and if the father is named on the birth certificate then he has rights, even finding ot 5 years later that his child has been taken to another country without permission COULD be the subject of legal action. Also, on the passport front, the OP should get the children British Passports otherwise they will be allowed in a visitors, and they will have to have their status changed or, according to immigration, they may be considered overstayers and the subject of legal action.