In child custody, it is important for the court to consider the opinions of the person who will be most affected by an order - the child.
Most states have some sort of provision to heed the child's desires.
As of December 1995, only Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont had no specific statute allowing the child's opinion to affect the outcome. In some states, there is an absolute right for the child to select with which parent he or she would like to live. Even if the child doesn't have the specific right to choose in which household she'll live, nearly all states will give the child the right to have input into the decision. What this means to the average parent seeking custody is that trying to get or retain custody over the child's outright objection will be difficult, unless the child's decision places him in a dangerous or inappropriate situation. A child may want to stay with father, because father has very few rules and lets her run the streets, while mother is more strict and sets a curfew.