How Much Choice Should Children Have in Custody Battles?
What if courts, when weighing custody, just asked this question: Which parent do you want to live with? Some believe that if judges listened more carefully to what children want, fewer parents would flee into the underground in the belief that the courts were ignoring their children’s wishes. Most children are never asked who they’d prefer to live with, legal experts say; or, if they are, little weight is given to their answers, especially if they are younger than age 12. Court decisions on the rights of children in custody cases have been contradictory so far. In 1993, a Missouri court refused to grant a 17-year-old youth and his two siblings’ request for their own lawyer in a custody dispute; but that same year, a Michigan court granted an 11-year-old’s request to cut off contact with her birth parents and live with the couple who had raised her. In the most notable case, 13-year-old Gregory Kingsley convinced a Florida court to allow him to “divorce” his parents, whom he claimed had
