Protecting Your School

No Comment: How to Keep a Parent’s Custody Battle From Becoming Your School’s Legal Problem

A step-by-step policy for staying out of divorced parents’ disputes, keeping your texts out of a courtroom, and knowing exactly when to walk a family out the door.

A member of one of our mastermind groups called in recently with a situation that had her rattled, and I want to walk through it, because sooner or later a version of it will land on your front desk too.

She had an eight-year-old student enrolled with his mother. The parents were going through a contentious divorce and custody fight. The father wasn’t on the contract, didn’t pay tuition, and for most of a year barely showed up. At one point he tried to pump her for information about the mother. She did the smart thing and stopped responding to his texts. He got angry that she’d gone quiet on him — and then, months later, those very text messages turned up read aloud in a courtroom, entered into the record of his custody case. Now there were three attorneys involved — his, hers, and one for the child — and one of them was accusing the school owner of failing to respond to correspondence she says she never received. The father had also called the head instructor directly and, in her words, threatened him. She was exhausted, she wanted to cancel the family’s membership, and she was afraid that doing so would get her sued.

None of that is really about martial arts. But it is very much about running a martial arts school, because your school sits in the middle of people’s lives, and their worst moments sometimes walk through your front door. Here is exactly how to handle it when they do.

The Policy Is “No Comment” — Full Stop

The single most important sentence in this entire article is this: you are there to teach the child kung fu, karate, jiu-jitsu, or whatever your art is. You are not there to adjudicate a marriage, and the moment you offer an opinion — even a sympathetic one — you have made yourself a witness in somebody else’s war.

When a parent, either parent, tries to pull you into their dispute, your answer is short and it never changes: “No comment.” If they ask how their child is doing in class, you can answer that, briefly and factually — he’s doing fine, he’s progressing like the other students his age. That’s it. You don’t elaborate, you don’t compare him to anyone, you don’t say anything that could be quoted back to you later. If the question veers toward the other parent, toward who’s lying to whom, toward who said what — “I’m not at liberty to talk about that.”

This applies to the child, too. Kids in the middle of a custody fight will sometimes test the waters with an instructor: “Is my mom talking about my dad?” The answer is still no comment, delivered kindly: “That’s something you need to talk to your parents about.” You are never, under any circumstance, the go-between who carries information from one parent to the other. The instant you do, you own a piece of their conflict.

If a parent emails, texts, or calls about anything — even something as innocuous as a schedule change — and you sense it’s really an attempt to draw you in, the answer is the same: “We’ll talk about it when you come to class.” You are not obligated to litigate custody arrangements over text message at ten o’clock at night.

Be Careful What You Put in Writing

Here is the part of this story that should make every school owner sit up: it wasn’t a phone call or an offhand comment that ended up in a courtroom. It was text messages. Private, ordinary, day-to-day texts that a school owner assumed would never see daylight outside her own phone got read into the record of a custody case, because one parent decided they were useful ammunition.

You have no control over what a party to a lawsuit decides to introduce as evidence, but you have complete control over what you put in writing in the first place. “No comment” can’t be twisted. A text message explaining your side of things, defending yourself, or venting your frustration absolutely can be — and will be, if it’s useful to somebody’s legal strategy. Say less. Say it in person when you can. And never, ever put your opinion of one parent, in relation to the other, into a text, an email, or a note in your management software. If it’s in writing, it’s discoverable, and discoverable means it can end up read out loud by a lawyer who doesn’t work for you.

One caveat, because I don’t want you to overcorrect into total silence: I actually believe in recording important conversations rather than avoiding a paper trail altogether, particularly when you sit both parents down together, which I’ll get to below. The difference is intent and content. A recorded conversation where you calmly, professionally lay out your policy is an asset if anyone ever questions how you handled the situation. A casual text where you take a side is a liability. Know the difference and act accordingly.

Don’t Cancel the Contract — Let Them Fire Themselves

Every instinct in you, when a family becomes this much of a headache, will be to end the relationship immediately: hand them a list of other schools and send them on their way. Resist that instinct, at least as your first move.

Abruptly cancelling a paying family’s contract, especially one in the middle of active litigation, hands their attorney exactly what they’re looking for: a claim that you had an agreement, took their money, and then unilaterally broke it. That’s a new front in a fight you already didn’t want to be in. You don’t need to open that can of worms.

Instead, hold the line on “no comment,” keep your responses short and boring, and let the disruptive parent decide the relationship isn’t working for them. In my experience, a parent who’s used to getting a reaction out of people eventually gets frustrated enough with “no comment” that they remove themselves from the equation. That’s a far cleaner outcome than you initiating the breakup, and it leaves you with no exposure at all.

When It Crosses the Line: My Two-Option Framework

Sometimes, though, a family becomes so disruptive that quietly waiting them out isn’t realistic. When that happens, I think about it as a choice between two options.

Option A is the direct conversation. Get both parents in the same room if they’ll do it, or on a video call if they won’t, and record it. Tell them plainly: we have nothing to do with your dispute, we’re not taking sides, but it has become disruptive to our school and to your child’s experience here. Take a pause. Go resolve your situation. When it’s resolved, come back and we’ll talk about your son or daughter continuing with us. Then you cancel the agreement and walk them to the door.

Option B is quieter: you simply, politely part ways without staging that confrontation. No blowup, no drawn-out explanation, just a clean and courteous exit.

Which one you choose depends on the family and the temperature of the situation, but more often than not I lean toward the calmer path — a polite conversation that says, as soon as this is resolved, let’s talk again about your child’s involvement, but for now, go handle what you need to handle. You’re not punishing the child for the parents’ fight; you’re simply declining to referee it.

I’ve Banned Parents From My Own Schools

I say all of this from experience, not theory. I’ve personally dealt with two situations very much like the one described above.

In one, an ex-wife had a restraining order against her ex-husband, and both the husband and their child were members at my school. I banned her from the premises. She showed up anyway, one day, specifically to have him arrested because he was there — and I had her escorted out by the police for trespassing. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was the right call, and it was unambiguous once I’d drawn the line.

The other situation ran the opposite direction: a father who behaved much like the one in this story, while the mother was perfectly fine to deal with. I sat down with the family and told them plainly that he wasn’t allowed in the school and wasn’t allowed to communicate with me directly. Both of those solutions worked. Neither was fun. But in both cases, the moment I stopped tolerating the disruption and drew a clear boundary, the problem stopped being my problem.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never been shy about ending a relationship with a family when it’s become genuinely toxic to the school. I know some coaches counsel a gentler, more patient approach, and there’s real value in that instinct — but at black belt and brown belt testing, in particular, I’ve always held the position that a child can be affected by a parent’s conduct, and a school owner has to weigh that reality rather than pretend the adults’ behavior is irrelevant to the child’s experience in your building.

The Discrimination Lawsuit You’re Probably Not Going to Face

A lot of owners freeze in these situations because they’re afraid that removing a difficult parent or declining to re-enroll a family will trigger a discrimination claim. In almost every version of this fear I’ve encountered, it doesn’t hold up.

Discrimination law protects characteristics — race, sex, religion, disability, and the like. It does not protect individuals simply because they’re individuals, and it certainly doesn’t protect bad behavior. If you decline to keep working with someone because they’ve been threatening your staff, showing erratic conduct, or making your school miserable to work in, that has nothing to do with any protected characteristic — it has to do with how they’re treating your people. That’s not discrimination. That’s a business making a reasonable decision about who it wants to serve.

Could a genuinely litigious person threaten to sue you anyway, on some invented theory? Sure, people threaten all sorts of things. But the fear of an imagined lawsuit shouldn’t keep you tolerating behavior that’s hurting your staff and your other families. As my colleague Dr. Greg Moody likes to put it, you can cut your arm off an inch at a time, or you can cut it off at the shoulder. A long, drawn-out tolerance of a toxic situation costs you far more, in stress and in staff morale, than a clean, well-handled exit.

The Bottom Line

You are running a martial arts school, not a family court. When parents try to drag you into their divorce, their custody fight, or their personal war with each other, your job is to stay entirely out of it: no comment, nothing in writing that takes a side, no abrupt cancellations that hand a lawyer a new argument, and a clear-eyed willingness to draw a boundary — whether that’s a direct conversation with both parents or a quiet, polite parting of ways — the moment the disruption outweighs the relationship. Handle it that way, and their war stays theirs. It never becomes yours.