Legal Question in Family Law in Minnesota

Awards of custody and parenting time in Minnesota are not dependent on the age of the child. A father can have joint legal and/or physical custody of a child at any age, and he can have overnight parenting time with a child even during infancy, provided he has the ability to properly care for the child. I have had several cases in which fathers of very young children have joint legal custody and overnight parenting time, even when the child is being breast fed by the mother. In some of those cases the mother will provide expressed milk at the time of the parenting time exchange, in other cases formula will be used.

That being said, parenting time with very young children is often a highly contentious issue. The father may want to spend time with the child, but the mother may be deeply suspicious of his ability to provide proper care, and may strongly resist any request for time. If the parties were never married, the mother may not have a great deal of trust in the father as a parent, and may not even know him well, or at least not as well as a couple that has been married for some time. The outcome in such cases is highly dependent on the facts and the dynamics of the relationship between the mother and father (and sometimes their extended families). Unlike cases involving older children, in which awards of parenting time are often treated as matters of routine by the court, cases involving very young children require much more careful attention. You should seek the assistance of an attorney if the father wants time with the child, even at this age. Nothing in the law requires him to wait until the child is 2 before he seeks custody or attempts to exercise his parental rights. In fact, the longer he delays in taking affirmative action to obtain time with the child, the more difficult it will become in the future. He should do something now.