Medical and school decisions across two homes — who decides what

Everyday decisions and decisions that need both parents

Most legal systems that give both parents an ongoing say in a child's life split decisions into two groups, whichever term they use for the underlying right: parental responsibility in the UK, foreldreansvar in Norway. Day-to-day decisions, the ones that come up during whichever parent's time it happens to be, sit with that parent alone: bedtime, screen time, what the child eats, which activity they go to that week. GOV.UK guidance lists what falls outside that group: education, medical treatment, religion, and a change of name need agreement from everyone who holds parental responsibility, not just the parent the child is with that day.

Bufdir, Norway's child and family affairs directorate, draws a similar line. When parents share foreldreansvar, both have to consent to a change to a private school (a place at a public school does not need joint agreement) and to planned medical treatment; moving the child abroad or applying for a passport needs that same joint consent. Acute medical treatment sits outside this list, a distinction with enough detail behind it to need its own section further down.

Choosing or changing a child's school

Which school a child attends is one of the decisions GOV.UK guidance places squarely in the joint category: parents are expected to discuss and agree on it, not have one parent enrol the child and inform the other afterwards. The guidance is specific about what a school should do if the two parents cannot agree: it should not choose a side, and should advise the parent who disagrees to raise the matter with the family court, typically through an application for what is called a specific issue order, a court ruling that settles one defined question without reopening the wider arrangement.

Choosing a school is a separate question from who gets information about it, and schools have had to draw that line explicitly. GOV.UK guidance for schools works through a real scenario: a parent asks the school to withhold reports and other educational information from their child's step-parent, who has day-to-day care of the child but not parental responsibility. The school is told it cannot comply; either parent with parental responsibility is entitled to be recorded as a contact and sent the child's educational information without needing the other parent's consent first.

School and co-parenting — staying coordinated

Medical treatment: three tiers, from routine to emergency

Medical decisions turn out to have three tiers, not two. Norway's Directorate of Health carves out a category for whatever counts as a child's daily and ordinary care: an ear infection, a sore throat, flu, a scraped knee. For that kind of routine treatment, either parent can consent alone and does not even need to tell the other parent first, because disagreement about whether it is necessary essentially never arises in practice.

Everything else splits along a planned-versus-emergency line. When parents share foreldreansvar, both have to consent to healthcare that is planned rather than routine, and if one parent refuses, there is no valid consent, whatever the other parent wants. That changes the moment a clinician judges that a child would come to harm without treatment: a single parent's consent is then enough, including where the other parent cannot be reached in time, though either parent can appeal to Norway's regional governor, the statsforvalteren, if they believe the case was wrongly treated as urgent.

For what this looks like week to week, such as who calls the doctor or how a course of medication travels between two homes, see the article on managing an actual illness. This section is about who is legally allowed to say yes, not how the appointment itself gets managed.

A sick child across two homes

When the two parents disagree about a specific treatment

Vaccination is the disagreement that comes up most often in practice, and Resolution, the UK association of family law professionals, has published specific guidance for it. Its advice is to try a neutral third party first, such as a mediator, rather than assume disagreement automatically means court. Before either parent can apply to court for a specific issue order in England and Wales, they are required to attend a Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting, a short session designed to check whether the dispute can be settled without a judge.

Where mediation does not resolve it, courts have tended to approve a vaccination that health authorities recommend for children generally, unless a parent can point to a specific medical reason it would harm this particular child, according to Resolution's guidance on the case law. The starting position is not that the parent who feels more strongly wins; a judge weighs the medical evidence for this specific child against a general recommendation.

A parent without full parental responsibility

Everything above assumes both parents hold legal parental responsibility, and that is not automatic everywhere. In England and Wales, an unmarried father does not get it simply by being the biological father: GOV.UK guidance sets out two routes, jointly registering the birth with the mother, or applying separately for a parental responsibility agreement or a court order. A father who has done neither has no legal right to be consulted on the decisions described above, whatever his actual involvement in the child's life.

Norway has moved the opposite direction. Since a change to the barnelova, the Children Act, that took effect on 1 January 2020, unmarried parents of a child born from that date automatically share foreldreansvar, with no registration step required. Either parent can still opt out within a year of paternity being established, but the starting position flipped from consent-required to joint-by-default. Two children born in Norway a year apart, to parents in otherwise identical living situations, can have different legal starting points purely because of the date.

Writing the split into the care agreement

None of this needs to be relearned at every decision if it is written down once. A care agreement can list, in plain terms, which recurring decisions are being treated as day-to-day (each home's own call) and which are being treated as ones the other parent gets consulted on before they happen, even where the legal default already says as much. Writing it down does not change the legal position, but it removes the argument about what that position actually is in the middle of a live disagreement.

A short, named list, such as choice of school, a change of GP, and any non-routine medical procedure, is more useful in practice than a general statement that "major decisions" will be made together, because it removes the argument about which category a specific decision falls into.

Writing a care agreement — what it should cover