What The Child Gets To Say
ORC 3109.04(B) — the interview in chambers, and the statement nobody may take
The section gives a child's own wishes a place in a custody case. It is one place, reached one way, and the section closes the other ways off.
There is no age at which the child decides. A particular age is often repeated as the point at which a child picks. The section names none. Where the court determines the child's wishes and concerns, they are one of the factors it weighs in the child's best interest, beside the others, and nothing in the section makes them the deciding one.
The way in is an interview in chambers. The court may interview any or all of the children about their wishes and concerns, and where either parent asks, it shall.
- Where the court interviews a child, it may appoint a guardian ad litem for the child, and it shall where either parent moves for one.
- The court first decides whether the child has enough reasoning ability to express wishes and concerns. Where the child does not, the court does not determine them.
- Where the child does, the court still decides whether special circumstances make it not in the child's best interest to determine them. If so it does not, and it enters written findings in the journal.
- Only the child, the child's attorney, the judge and necessary court personnel may be present in chambers during the interview, and each parent's attorney at the judge's discretion. The parents themselves are not on that list.
No letter, no recording, no affidavit. No person shall obtain or attempt to obtain from a child a written or recorded statement or affidavit setting out the child's wishes and concerns about custody, and no court deciding the child's best interest may accept or consider one. A letter to the judge, a video on a phone, a signed statement: the section closes that door to everyone, parents included.
The same wishes come back when an order is changed. The best interest factors apply to a modification as they do to the first decree, and the child's wishes and concerns, as expressed to the court in chambers, are one of them.
How a guardian ad litem is chosen, what the guardian does, and what goes in the guardian's report are set by court rules and local practice rather than by this section. Whether a particular child is interviewed, and what a court makes of what the child says, depends on the judge and the facts. A licensed Ohio attorney reads a specific case.
Sources for this section (1)
- ORC 3109.04 — Allocating parental rights and responsibilities, and the best interest of the child
Legal information, not legal advice. Verified as of September 2026. Talk to a licensed Ohio attorney about your situation.