We asked: Can you ask your son-in-law to skip a family vacation?
Our travel advice column responds to a viral post about planning trips for nuclear families only.
December 12, 2025
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A colleague recently shared a spicy Instagram reel with our travel team with a headline that read: “Is it WRONG to take a family vacation … without your sons or daughters-in-law?” We discussed.
“Let me say something a lot of parents are afraid to admit,” began Janice Greene, who goes by Grandma Jan on social media. “Yes, it’s absolutely okay to take a vacation — a family vacation — without your sons- and daughter-in-law.”
As a newly-minted daughter-in-law (a year and a half into marriage), my eyes bulged. But I kept watching.
Greene laid out her argument: sometimes you want alone time with your grown-up kids. It doesn’t mean you don’t love their partners, or that there’s conflict. Maybe the in-law might even appreciate having an excuse to skip out while you enjoy some “just us” moments with “your original crew.”
“There’s a big difference between excluding someone and planning something that isn’t meant to include everyone,” Greene said in her post. “Families are allowed to have branches, not every branch has to be on every trip.”
The video has been watched over 2 million times across Instagram and TikTok. Commenters were not shy. Among the most “liked” replies were comments such as “May this mother in law never find me,” and, “If you raised decent kids, they wouldn’t go without their spouses,” and, “Hey so this is insane.”
I was torn. I could see Greene’s point: The dynamic of a trip (or dinner or any kind of tradition) does change if you bring in someone beyond your nuclear family. But I’d probably be hurt to be left out of a vacation plan, regardless of the reasoning. If they really liked me enough, wouldn’t they prefer I was there?
I took the question to etiquette experts and travel planners who are paid to orchestrate happy family vacations (and sometimes play therapist to clients).
Was Greene off base? Is there a polite way to ask to travel sans spouses? Or is it rude to ask couples to separate under any circumstances?
Lizzie Post, co-president at the Emily Post Institute and co-host of the Awesome Etiquette podcast, said it’s “absolutely fine from an etiquette perspective” to request some time alone with your children. But “it’s all on how you frame it,” she said.
Excluding people from something called a “family vacation” can make it sound like you don’t see them as part of the family. Tweaking the name of the trip might alleviate that potential tension.
“If she wants to spend time with her daughters on their own, call it a ‘girls trip,’” Post said.
The kind of vacation also matters, said etiquette consultant Jules Martinez Hirst. If this is really about spending quality time together, maybe go with a beach weekend versus a bucket-list safari.
Lisa Richey, founder of The American Academy of Etiquette, said it’s not a black-and-white situation. There are families who would love this and others that wouldn’t. Will the scenario put your child in an awkward position with their spouse? Will it require your in-law to take on stressful solo parenting? Will they actually appreciate the alone time?
What matters most is the state of your relationship with your in-laws in general.
If there’s even a hint of friction, she strongly advises against the split invite.
“I would say generally no, don’t do this,” Richey said. “It could cause ripple effects,” like people “never getting over it, feeling left out … harboring resentment.”
Diana Hechler, president of D. Tours Travel, has two grown sons with spouses. She agrees.
“The repercussions would go on for years and just fester,” she said. “It’s a terrible idea.”
However, Richey understands that there are circumstances where it would be nice to spend time alone with your kids outside of a big group.
“There are people that don’t want the big 36 people in an Airbnb [trip],” she said. “There is a little bit of a loss of connection.”
Alli Allen, a travel adviser who plans trips for clients, sees how family trips can snowball over time. She’s currently organizing a trip for a client that will require 18 rooms between one set of grandparents, their adult children and their grandkids.
On the whole, most of the trips she plans for clients are “very inclusive” — some parents even bring along boyfriends and girlfriends of kids who are in high school or college. But as a mom of adult kids, Allen thinks it would be “amazing” to have a trip as just a nuclear family again. She often reminds clients to “plan trips that count” because you might not realize your next family trip might be your last.
Even though she likes the idea of recreating the family trip of those bygone days, “I wouldn’t do it,” Allen said. The risk of hurt feelings is too high, and at the end of the day, it’s not about the perfect travel scenario. “It’s all about the memories,” she said.
If are going to ask for a specialized trip, Richey says check in with your children first to see how their spouse might react “before just announcing at Thanksgiving or the Christmas holiday table ‘Oh, by the way, I’m taking my son and my daughter to the Caribbean and the spouses are not included,’ ” she said. “That is not the way to do it.”
Hirst recommends giving a simple and gracious explanation to the in-laws early on. Also, make sure you’re spending quality time with the in-laws at other points of the year and let them know you care about them.
It’s the same advice Greene offers in her video, although she’s not sure that message came across to most viewers.
Greene, an occupational therapist who works with special needs children in Florida, said she was completely shocked by the reaction to her video.
While some people reached out with support, the most vocal reactions have been negative.
“I got a death threat,” she said in a phone interview. “I had people telling me to kill myself.”
She started posting her “Grandma Camp” videos in April as a way to share fun tips and ideas with fellow grandparents, and her opinion was meant to give people permission to seek quality time with their kids, not make a dig at her own in-laws (or make rage bait). She knows every family is different, what works in hers — Greene’s nuclear family is just her and her three daughters — won’t work for everyone.
Greene said she made the video shortly before taking a trip to South Carolina with her daughters and their spouses; they take trips together often. (Two of the daughters posted on their mom’s account to support her opinion, but that hasn’t stopped the barrage of negative comments.)
She said she loves spending time with her in-laws, but appreciates the opportunity to get her daughters alone on occasion.
“Sometimes you want to just goof around and be silly, and you act different when your spouse is there — you just do,” she said. “And that’s okay. But it is fun to just be with the girls.”
I agree.
Travelista Alli 