Let's stop asking children to choose between their parents

There is probably no better known story of how a single question can ruin a young person’s life. The man at the center of it is still alive, and he agreed to talk about it.

Most people who have seen Catch Me If You Can remember the cons, the planes, the chase. Far fewer remember the scene at the very beginning. The parents are divorcing. A court official sits the sixteen-year-old Frank down and tells him it is simple: write one name, his mother’s or his father’s, in the box, and the court will respect his choice.

Frank throws the pen down and runs. He runs out of his own home. He cannot choose between the two people he loves most in the world. He will not give up either of them. He was sixteen and extraordinarily capable, and still he could not do it. On the day this question reached a real courtroom, the judge did not even look at him. Frank ran. Unlike in the film, he never saw his father again.

The film is based on a true story, and Frank Abagnale is still with us. When I reached out to thank him for writing the book that made Steven Spielberg’s film, and made it possible for me to use that scene in my own custody case, he did something I did not expect. He agreed to an interview, and he linked to it from his official website.

In that interview Frank put the heart of it plainly:

There was absolutely no way I could pick between my mother and my father. I loved them both and I was concerned of a lifelong resentment from either one if I didn’t choose them.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. A child who is asked to choose is not being given freedom. The child is being handed a wound. For Frank it was the impossibility of facing the lifelong disappointment of the parent he did not pick. He could not live with that, so he chose neither, and ran.

I am not writing this as a film critic. I am writing it because the same question is still asked of children every week, in plain courtrooms, in ordinary towns, far from any movie. My own children are much younger than Frank was. I never wanted them to decide which parent to give up.

The system often tells itself it is only doing what the child wants. But a child under pressure does not make a free choice. The child reads the room, senses which answer keeps the peace, and pays for it for the rest of their life. Roughly twenty to forty percent of children of divorce lose or severely limit contact with one parent. Many of those losses start with a question that should never have been asked.

So this is my ask, the same one I made of a lawyer across a courtroom years ago, and the same one Frank made of the world: let’s stop asking children to choose between their parents.

If this matters to you, the full interview with Frank Abagnale is on our site. Read it, share it with anyone facing a custody case, and write to me if you want it translated for your country. Children deserve both parents.

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