Can A Child Choose Who To Live With In Texas?

Hey folks, Mark Scroggins with Scroggins Law Group and before we get into these Q and A’s want to remind everybody that this is just providing a general answer to questions that are posed by our listenership and viewership out there. So at no time does that create an attorney client relationship between you and me, or between you and any member of Scroggins Law Group. So I hope these questions are good for you and answer some of the questions that you got. The next question that we get folks is, is a child able to choose which parent to live with in Texas? And the answer on that is no as well. Okay. There used to be what was called an affidavit of choice and the affidavit of choice has been out of the books for a while because it was so easily manipulated, but what you do have is at the age of 12, you have the ability to force the court to confer with the child, okay, I say force, because sometimes the judges like doing that, and sometimes the judges don’t like doing that. Now, having said that, just because a child confers with the judge and tells the judge that hey, I want to live with dad or I want to live with mom doesn’t mean that that necessarily is what the court is going to do. Okay. It is just one more piece of evidence that a court can consider in making its determination of where the child is going to reside.