'We don't want to live with dad': Children wrote to politicians, and now their mother is on trial for it

A thirteen-year-old girl and her eleven-year-old brother refuse to live with their father following their parents' divorce, and on July 1 they wrote to MPs, senators, government ministries and the President's office asking for help. The court did not believe the children were speaking from their own negative experience, concluding instead that their mother had turned them against their father. Police have since opened a criminal case against her, and her contact with the children has been reduced to one supervised hour per week.

According to rulings by the Municipal and Regional Courts in Brno, the mother allegedly systematically obstructs the children's relationship with their father and turns them against him. An April ruling by the regional court states that the children were left without adequate care and that their psychological development is "seriously at risk" due to manipulation, disrupted schooling, and the mother's failure to provide them with necessary professional support.

The court took a drastic step: it removed the children from their mother, placed them in a crisis center in southern Moravia, and then restricted her contact with them, ruling that custody should pass to the father. Police also got involved: acting on a report from the child protection authority, they opened a criminal case against the mother — initially on suspicion of abusing a dependent person, later reclassified as endangering the upbringing of a child. It was this criminal prosecution that led the court to strip her of nearly all her parental rights.

"It feels like we're in prison, even though we haven't done anything"

"We haven't been home for four months. It feels like prison, even though we haven't done anything wrong. And we know for certain that mom is our rock," the children wrote from the crisis center at the start of the summer holidays. According to them, their mother believes them, and they miss her terribly.

The children insist that their rejection of their father reflects their own views and experiences, not something they were coached to say. The courts, however, concluded that their rejection of the father stems from prolonged influence by the mother. The editorial team does not have access to the full case file and cannot judge which parent is in the right in this bitter dispute — but the case raises a broader question: when should the state trust a child's own stated wishes, and when should it assume the child is acting under someone else's influence?

Criticism from a senator and the ombudswoman

One of the few politicians to respond to the children's letter was lawyer and Senator Hana Marvanová. She requested the case documents and says she found no expert report proving that the mother had manipulated the children against their father. "This is a classic post-divorce dispute between two parents, and the children clearly explain what fears are keeping them from wanting to live with their father. I am convinced that in exactly these kinds of cases, a child's opinion must be taken into account, as set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child," she said.

Marvanová criticized the courts and police for dragging criminal law tools into parental disputes: "These institutions are criminalizing one parent simply because a child complains about the other." She said she has seen a marked increase in such cases in her practice recently, whereas ten years ago nothing like this happened.

The children's mother, a special education teacher by profession, is now under investigation on suspicion of endangering a child's upbringing. Because of the criminal case, she had to leave her job at school. "On top of worrying about the children, I now also have serious financial worries," she says. According to her account, the children's father stopped taking an interest in them as far back as when their younger son was born — 11 years ago — and his indifference lasted until 2024. The father's lawyer, Jan Hroborz, presents the opposite version of events: he claims it was the mother's actions that destroyed the children's relationship with their father and turned them against him, while the father was simply less assertive at first.

The prosecutor's office and the children's rights ombudswoman weigh in

Supreme Public Prosecutor Lenka Bradáčová said prosecutors have recorded cases where one parent's manipulation caused psychological harm to a child, but she had no data on how many such criminal cases have been opened recently or how they were resolved. She did, however, acknowledge a broader trend: "In recent years we have noticed a tendency to criminalize conflicts that, by their nature, should be handled as civil rather than criminal matters."

Asked why police do not take seriously the views of a twelve-year-old child about who they want to live with, Bradáčová said the credibility of a child's testimony must be assessed on a strictly individual basis, taking into account the child's maturity and ability to reliably describe events around them.

Over the summer, Michaela Nosková, ombudswoman at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, stepped into the case. After negotiating with the local guardianship authority, she managed to find a way to get the children out of the crisis center without handing them straight over to the father, with whom they refuse to live. "What surprises me most is that on one hand we say a twelve-year-old can express what they want, but the moment they do, the system tends to claim they're lying because the other parent coached them. To me, that's completely illogical," she said.

As a temporary solution, the children's maternal grandmother took them in, collecting them from the crisis center in the middle of summer. But the dispute is far from over: now that the school holidays have ended, the children still don't know where or with whom they will live, or which school they will attend.

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Source: seznamzpravy.cz