Legal Question in Family Law in Florida

Re: Child Rights

Without a court order the biological mother has no rights. Your daughter's wishes are one aspect the court would take into consideration.

Re: Child Rights

The previous poster is correct IF in fact there is no court order. Often there is one and the missing parent has just ingnored their rights and then show up and want to rectify. She will likely be allowed to have visitation, starting very slowly and under strict supervision.

You should encourage the child to have this visitation, studies show she will be seriously harmed if she is kept from knowing the other parent when she knows antoher parent exists. If she has such a bad attitude about visiting it is likely that someone has socialized her to think badly of her mother. This will hurt her as children derive 1/2 of their self image from each parent more or less and even if she onlly derives 1% of her self image from her, don't you want that to be a positive thing? You should take your child to counselling immediately and I have to tell you behaving in a selfish manner here will do nobody any good in the long run. The child has a right, and further, something of an obligation to herself (although she is too young to know that now) to get to know both sides of the story and make an educated decision. She is NOT old enough now. I see you are in Key west, I was there for 12 years. I can tell you the judges are very liberal compared to much of FL and they are going to give the child's wishes pretty much NO credence at that age, and they should NOT give her wishes any credence at that age.

Do yourself and her a favor and seek counselling now, her response to the request indicates she has already been damaged by this situation.