Utah courts deciding child custody and parent-time disputes are charged with acting in the “best interests of the child.” But with exceptions so rare as to be almost meaningless, Utah courts (judges and domestic relations commissioners) refuse to hear directly from the very children whose lives they are reshaping.
This is not an accident. It is not merely caution. And it is, at bottom, not really about protecting children (even if some honestly believe otherwise).
It is a systemic choice—one that trades accuracy, accountability, and legitimacy for convenience, insulation, and delegated responsibility. That choice has consequences. And it is time to name them plainly.
This essay is written for parents, children, lawyers, judges, and commissioners. It is not written to persuade everyone; for those willing to examine the issue honestly, the point should be self-evident.
What the Courts Say
When Utah judges and commissioners explain why they do not interview minor children in custody and parent-time disputes, the reasons sound humane and responsible (because there is an element of genuine concern to them):
- Children should not be put “in the middle.”
- Children can be coached or manipulated.
- Judges are not trained child psychologists.
- Interviewing children risks forcing them to choose between parents.
- Interviewing children risks exposing the child to retaliation by a parent who feels the child depicted him/her in an unflattering light.[1]
- The process may be emotionally harmful.
These justifications are not without some merit, but they are profoundly incomplete and do not justify a systemic code of silence.
Utah courts routinely expose children to emotional strain when it suits institutional norms: custody evaluations, PGAL interviews, therapy disclosures, collateral interviews, repeated retellings of intimate experiences to multiple adults—often over months or years. The objection is not to children speaking. It is to children speaking directly to the court, on the record. That distinction matters. As a consequence, what courts actually avoid is not child involvement, but child testimony that is verifiable, reviewable, and attributable.
What’s Really Happening
Recorded Child Interviews Create Appellate Risk
A recorded in camera interview—especially one preserved by audio and video—creates a real evidentiary record. Words are captured as spoken. Tone, affect, hesitation, confidence, and confusion are visible. Inconsistencies cannot be retroactively harmonized.
That record can be reviewed.
By contrast, Utah courts rely heavily on filtered intermediaries (PGALs, custody evaluators, therapists) whose summaries are problematic in their own right, but worsened by being unsworn (in the case of PGAL “disclosures” and “recommendations”), interpretive, and difficult to review on appeal. These intermediaries block the court from hearing the child’s actual voice by providing a transparently unconvincing appearance of genuine child input.
Judges value discretion. Recorded child testimony protects against abuse of discretion. This is not conjecture. It is how systems behave when exposed to review.
Child Interviews Collapse the Proxy System
Utah custody practice is built on delegation. Rather than hearing from children directly, courts rely on a class of intermediaries who translate a child’s experience into professional language.
This arrangement has benefits—for the system.
It allows judges and commissioners to:
- Avoid direct exposure to emotionally difficult testimony
- Rely on “recommendations” rather than the best and complete evidence
- Shift moral responsibility elsewhere
This plainly comes at a cost.
When a judge hears directly from a child, the proxy becomes superfluous. The P/GAL’s summary can be contradicted. The evaluator’s narrative can be tested. The court must assess credibility based upon the evidence in the record.
That is in no way a failure of professionalism or a betrayal of children. It is basic judging.
The resistance to child interviews reflects not concern about harm, but discomfort with reclaiming responsibility that has been outsourced.
Direct Testimony Exposes Fragile Narratives
Many custody decisions rest on broad, unexamined claims:
- “The child is afraid.”
- “The child feels unsafe.”
- “The child resists contact.”
- “The child lacks insight.”
These statements often survive because no one asks follow-up questions in a setting that requires clarity.
When children are heard directly, courts sometimes discover that:
- The fear is vague or derivative
- The language is borrowed from adults
- The concern is narrow, situational, or resolvable
- The information was obtained under questionable or unreliable circumstances
- The narrative collapses under basic clarification
This does not mean children are lying. It means adults often over-interpret.
Second-hand reporting protects these narratives from scrutiny. Direct testimony does not.
Why Second-Hand Accounts Fail in Ordinary, Predictable Ways
Second-hand reporting about children is not unreliable because professionals are dishonest or careless (although they certainly can be and often are, in my experience). It is unreliable because intermediaries almost inevitably freeze a moment in time and mistake it for a stable psychological truth, rather than a situational blip.
Consider a few unremarkable scenarios that occur constantly in real families.
A child is interviewed on a day when he had a heated argument with a parent that morning—over discipline, homework, screen time, a broken promise, or a perceived slight. When asked how he feels about that parent or about spending time with them, the child expresses irritation, emotional distance, or resistance. The response may be genuine in the moment, but it reflects a temporary emotional state, not the enduring quality of the parent-child relationship. When that statement is later summarized by a PGAL or evaluator as “the child is angry with Mother” or “the child resists parent-time,” the situational context disappears, and a transient emotion is elevated into a structural fact about custody.
Or take a child interviewed while recovering from a prolonged illness. The child is fatigued, slower to respond, less verbally engaged, and emotionally flat. An intermediary may describe the child as “withdrawn,” “reticent,” or “guarded,” implicitly attributing psychological meaning to what is, in reality, physical exhaustion. Without a recording—and without the ability to observe affect, energy level, and responsiveness directly—the court receives a clinical interpretation divorced from its physiological cause.
These are not edge cases. They are ordinary childhood realities. Children argue. They get sick. They have bad days. They are moody, tired, hungry, distracted, embarrassed, or annoyed—sometimes for reasons entirely unrelated to either parent. Second-hand reporting strips away that context (especially when interviews are not recorded). What remains is a flattened narrative that appears stable, diagnostic, and reliable but isn’t.
The same problem repeats across a wide range of common situations.
Children often experience performance anxiety when interviewed by strangers in formal settings. They may become quiet, cautious, or monosyllabic, not because they fear a parent, but because they fear saying the wrong thing or being misunderstood. Yet second-hand summaries frequently recast this interview-specific anxiety as “reluctance to engage,” “guardedness,” or “discomfort discussing Father,” converting situational stress into relational pathology.
Without direct observation and without a record that allows re-evaluation, personality quirks are misread as emotional or relational deficits.
Children also actively manage loyalty. They modulate what they say based on who they believe will hear it, repeat it, or react to it. A child who downplays affection for one parent may be attempting to protect that parent from conflict, avoid triggering adult distress, or remain neutral. Intermediaries may interpret this as alienation, coaching, or enmeshment. Just as dangerously, they may miss genuine alienation entirely because the child has learned to present a neutral, scripted affect that conceals internal conflict. Without direct, recorded questioning that allows follow-up and observation of inconsistency, courts are left guessing, and often guessing wrong by often guessing in a “defensive” mindset.
Ordinary parenting conflict is likewise miscast. When a parent enforces an unpopular boundary (curfews, chores, consequences, limits on screens) the child may express anger, resistance, or a desire to avoid contact if interviewed shortly thereafter. Second-hand summaries then convert routine discipline into evidence of relational breakdown: “the child feels controlled,” “the child does not feel heard,” or “the child prefers the other parent.” In this way, responsible parenting is wrongfully penalized.
Developmental timing compounds the problem. Children pass through predictable phases: adolescents pull away, pre-teens oscillate, younger children idealize one parent and then the other. Snapshot interviews freeze a developmental moment and treat it as a durable preference. Recommendations then calcify what should have been transient. Courts end up enforcing a phase.
Even the physical environment of an interview can distort interpretation. A child questioned in a small, unfamiliar office, after a long school day, while hungry or overstimulated, or in the presence of adults perceived as authority figures may appear irritable, flat, overwhelmed, or eager to please. Those cues are then assigned emotional meaning unrelated to the child’s lived experience. Without video, judges cannot distinguish environmental stress from emotional honesty.
Children also answer the question they think is being asked. When asked, “How do you feel about going to Dad’s house?” a child may actually be responding to an unspoken meta-question: Is it okay to dislike transitions? Is this a test? Will this get me in trouble? Second-hand summaries almost never capture this dynamic. Direct questioning, with the ability to slow down, clarify, and reframe, sometimes does.
Finally, children speak in the present tense. What is true today may not have been true last month—or tomorrow. Second-hand reporting routinely reifies immediacy into permanence. Once an intermediary writes, “the child appears anxious about Mother,” that phrase gains authority. It travels. It is repeated. It shapes future interviews. At that point, the child’s voice is no longer the evidence. The interpreter’s conclusion is.
None of these failures require bad faith. They arise from ordinary childhood variability interacting with institutional shortcuts. Second-hand reporting does not merely summarize; it selects, filters, labels, and stabilizes.
Direct, recorded interviews do not guarantee truth. But they preserve context, allow re-interpretation, and make error visible far better than the current de facto system Utah courts implement. And in custody cases, visibility is not cruelty. It is the minimum requirement for legitimacy.
Judges Are Human, and This Is Hard Work
There is an unspoken but very real sentiment in custody courts:
“This job is already hard and thankless. Interviewing children is asking too much.”
Judges and commissioners face crushing dockets, emotionally volatile disputes, constant dissatisfaction, and little public gratitude. Interviewing children requires emotional labor of a different order: sustained attention, moral clarity, and the willingness to sit with discomfort that cannot be proceduralized away.
But difficulty has never excused abdication of responsibility.
Utah judges already decide gut-wrenching issues involving children in domestic relations and other kinds of cases. Against that backdrop, the claim that hearing from a child is categorically unreasonable does not withstand scrutiny.
A Note on Commissioner Deferral
What is really being avoided is not harm—but ownership. A common interview avoidance practice among Utah domestic commissioners is the deflection of: “That’s the judge’s call, so I’ll defer to the judge on whether the child should be interviewed.” This posture is polite, procedural, and transparently hollow.
Commissioners know that judges always retain the authority to overrule a commissioner’s decision to interview a child if the judge can articulate a defensible reason for doing so. That is already how the system works (as the commissioners well know).
This “deferring in advance” does not protect the child, preserve jurisdiction, or respect institutional boundaries; it is simply a way to kick the can down the road so that no interview happens. It is not humility. It is plausibly deniable abdication, an attempt to avoid responsibility while preserving the appearance of prudence.
And if a judge or commissioner genuinely concludes that he or she cannot personally conduct a child interview with the care and attention it requires—whether because of time, emotional bandwidth, or docket constraints—that limitation does not justify silencing the child. It imposes a duty on the court to permit the child’s account to be obtained on the record through some other appropriate, verifiable means, rather than allowing judicial exhaustion to become a barrier to evidence.
The System Prefers Stability Over Accuracy
Utah family courts are overloaded. They survive by routinization.
Child interviews slow things down. They force courts to confront facts that do not fit neatly into existing frameworks.
Stability—procedural and institutional—is often valued more than precision.
So courts convince themselves that “we already know enough.” Sometimes that is true. Often it is not.
Why the Alternatives Are Worse
The real comparison is not between child interviews and some idealized notion of protection. It is between in camera child interviews and the actual substitutes Utah courts use now.
Silence
When courts hear nothing from children, decisions default to adult advocacy, rhetorical polish, and resource asymmetry. Silence does not protect children; it erases them.
P/GALs
The summary statements of Guardians ad Litem and Private Guardians ad Litem in Utah are subjective, selective, and interpretive. They are immune from discovery. P/GAL disclosures and recommendations are thus difficult, often impossible, to challenge. P/GAL statements are not testimony. Yet their communications are often treated as evidence in violation of the rules of evidence. P/GALs do not satisfy the evidentiary burden. They obscure it.
Custody Evaluators
Custody evaluations are too expensive, too slow, and uneven in quality. They rely heavily on subjective opinion, often framed in scientific objectivity. Courts defer to them not because they are infallible, but because they offer structure, familiarity, and a sense of procedural safety.
It is also important to acknowledge the structural context in which evaluators work. Appointment practices inevitably favor professionals whose reports are predictable, legible to the court, and consistent with prevailing judicial policy and the attendant frameworks. This need not involve conscious accommodation or bad faith. Like any repeat-player system, over time it rewards approaches that align smoothly with institutional expectations.
That reality does not make evaluators dishonest, but it does mean their conclusions are shaped by the environment in which they operate. As a result, custody evaluations are not safer than direct, on-the-record testimony. They are simply more mediated, more filtered, more conventional, and further removed from the child’s actual voice.
And when an evaluator’s interviews of a child are not audio-visually recorded, the court is asked to accept not only the evaluator’s conclusions, but the very existence and substance of the child’s statements, on faith rather than on verifiable fact. The evaluation becomes insulated from meaningful scrutiny, and any error—whether interpretive, contextual, or methodological—becomes effectively undiscoverable.
The Case for Recorded In Camera Interviews
If Utah courts are serious about child welfare, then recorded, audio-visual in camera interviews should be embraced, not feared.
In practice, the only reliable way to ensure that a court actually hears from a child is for the court to conduct the interview itself. When interviews are delegated to intermediaries—even if recorded—the court almost invariably relies on summaries and recommendations rather than engaging directly with the primary evidence.
A sound approach would include:
- audio and video recording as the default, absent compelling reasons otherwise
- age-appropriate questioning both in scope and duration, focused on primarily eliciting both experience and preference—the weight a child’s preference may be given requires a record of the preference exist
- preservation of the record for review and accountability
- counsel participation by proposal or stipulation where appropriate
This is not radical. It is ordinary evidentiary hygiene.
Recording protects:
- children (from mischaracterization)
- parents (from distortion)
- courts (from misremembering or misrepresentation)
Recording protects the legitimacy of the process itself.
Unrecorded interviews, by contrast, ask everyone to trust without verification. That is not compassion, it is opacity.
This Is Not Too Much to Ask
Interviewing children in custody cases is not beyond the role of a Utah judge or commissioner. It is squarely within it. What is beyond the role—what is indefensible—is pretending that second-hand summaries are morally safer, epistemically superior, or more humane than direct, careful, recorded testimony.
Interviews are useless without being recorded (and the rationales offered to justify unrecorded interviews are transparent and unpersuasive). Some cases require child interviews. Most cases would benefit from a child interview. Treating such input as an aberration rather than a norm is a systemic failure, not a virtue.
Child testimony truly matters, and under conditions that allow it to be recorded and for the factuality of testimony itself to be tested. There is no humane shortcut around that reality.
Accountability Is Not Cruelty
No Utah judge or commissioner can resist child interviews by claiming to care too much about children. They resist because interviews:
- create records
- reduce discretion
- increase accountability
- expose weak narratives
- force ownership of hard decisions
Those are not reasons to avoid the practice. They are reasons to adopt it.
The legitimacy of the courts depends not on how insulated they are from discomfort, but on how willing they are to confront reality—carefully and transparently, and on the record.
Welcoming reliable, testable child input is not radical. It is overdue. The longer the system resists it, the harder it will be to claim that “best interests” means what it says.
Utah Family Law, LC | divorceutah.com | 801-466-9277
[1] Concerns about retaliation are legitimate. In some high-conflict cases—particularly those involving coercive control, emotional abuse, or parental instability—a child perceived as having spoken unfavorably about a parent may face subtle or overt consequences. That risk must be taken seriously. But the existence of risk does not justify categorical avoidance. All evidentiary choices in custody cases carry some potential for harm; the relevant inquiry is which approach produces the most reliable information while allowing the court to identify and mitigate danger. When a court declines to create a record, it does not merely limit information—it limits accountability: what the record does not contain cannot be tested, reviewed, or defended on appeal. Refusing to inquire with the child does not eliminate the risk of retaliation; it ignores it. Properly structured, audio-visual recorded in camera interviews—with controlled access and protective measures where appropriate—reduce risk by anchoring judicial action in verifiable evidence and preserving a record capable of appellate scrutiny.
