minors allowed to choose?
I am not a lawyer, but have quite an opinion on the matter of children choosing which parent to reside with. My husband and I have been on both sides of this issue. His daughter had lived with us for the past 3 years. Although she begged her father and I to fight for her, it was ultimately her mother who decided to let her come live with us. Now she is 14 1/2 and does not like our rules (grounding for grades, lying, ect.). So, she and her mother decided she should live with mother again. We said no, she chose to live with us, now she must live by our rules and accept her responsibility for grades, ect.. Mother knew enough about the law that the only way to get daughter back without going to court would be to involve social services and accuse us of abuse, and prove daughter has medical issues. So, stepdaughter accuses my husband of spanking younger sister, hence all children are taken from our house. Alligations are proven to be lies, but by the time all this takes place 14 yr. old has been living w/mother 2 weeks, wont retun father's calls. Social Services says they agree 14 yr. old was manipulating situation, but cant do anything about it. This goes on for past 3-4 mo.s. She comes and goes as she pleases, we have no discipline with her, she talks to us (and other adults) anyway she pleases, she throws fits more forcefully and more often but the sad part is she has lost our trust and broken our hearts. So we went from the parents fighting for her and now we are the parents fighting against her by her choice. I feel if we had the courts backing us, as they do most mothers, stepdaughter would accept responsibility for her actions and learn from mistakes, as it is now, she has lied, manipulated situations, and continues to because she has gotten away with it all, and no one has said, that was wrong, you hurt alot of people, but mostly yourself, your character. I felt before she lived with us that yes, children should be able to choose, because she was begging us and telling us how terrible her mother was, now the shoe is on the other foot, we are the terrible ones. Although I've told her mother I now can understand the position she was put in 3 years ago, she shouldn't use it to get back at us, after all she allowed daughter to live with us and we agreed to do our best to raise her. Now instead of backing our decisions with daughter she has encouraged her to lie to get what she wants and we are helpless in the situation. We will go to court in June, and nothing will change. We will pay higher child support although she paid us nothing while daughter lived with us. Alot of it comes down to money, it is an important issue, we paid her allimony for 5 years while she got a college degree, didn't work, and we kept all girls (3) for her when she needed a break, now she has remarried, our payments to her are 1/2 of what they were (no alimony, just child support), so not enough for her, back to court we go. My advice to you from an ordinary person is try to back your exspouse if he is willing to back you because the child will end up loosing her morals when she can get away with what ever parents and the system allow. That was not our situation, and isn't most peoples, which is why troubled children in our society end up being troubled adults. Good luck to you, exspouse and child.
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