Kids Pointed Out A 'Plot Hole' In The Parent Trap, And Now The Internet Is Arguing About Car Safety

Movies are an artifact of the time in which they are made. It can be somewhat jarring to watch a movie today that relies on landline telephones or doesn’t include the existence of the internet. However, a recent viral social media post has people discussing something else that has changed drastically over the years: child car seat laws.

A pair of Twitter posts has both gone viral recently regarding Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. The first brought attention to what it called a “plot hole” that a viewer's kids were blown away by, a very young Lindsay Lohan sitting in the front seat of a car while talking to her on-screen dad, Dennis Quaid. A second tweet that has blown up on its own didn’t seem to understand what the issue was.

There are different issues at hand here, and it’s likely that both have led to the second tweet going viral. One group of fans assumed the post didn’t understand why a 12-year-old sitting in the front seat of the car was a problem, leading to many people discussing the fact that in most states today, it wouldn’t be legal for this child to be sitting there, though that certainly wasn’t the case three decades ago. Comments included…

• It is no longer legal for 12-year-olds to do that. - @hulsey_ryan
• in real life they would both get arrested - @TheGreatErenan
• Because before society got overly protective for no reason, kids could sit in the front seat. Fuck I use to ride in my grandfather's pickup in the late 80s with no seatbelt. - @Syphermce
• It was 1998. They didn’t have laws we have now. Kids can’t understand that - @ZombieGoddessxi

While laws regarding where and how kids can sit in cars vary by state, many, including California where this scene in The Parent Trap takes place, set a height limit of 4’ 9” before kids can sit in the front seat of a car. While finding Lohan’s height when she filmed The Parent Trap is a bit tough right now, considering the actress is 5’5” today, it’s certainly possible she was under that limit when this scene was shot.

But as many commenters point out, while it might be a bit wild to watch this scene today because of modern laws, it certainly wasn’t against the law when the movie was made for Lohan to be sitting in the front seat of a car. Beyond that, even if it was illegal, that still doesn’t make it a “plot hole.”

A plot hole is a gap or contradiction in a story based on the internal rules of the world. A dad putting his daughter in the front seat isn’t a plot hole, even if it happens to be a bad idea. Characters are allowed to make decisions antithetical to good sense and the law. Real people do all the time.

That said, if this conversation gets enough traction and if The Parent Trap 2 ever happens, I fully expect we'll get a scene that references this issue in the same way the Beauty and the Beast remake addressed every "plot hole" in that movie.