people often ask you know what’s the
significance of legal custody what’s the
significance of physical custody and
they’ll say i want both exclusively and
and that’s that’s it and nothing else so
first of all legal custody is by far the
most important custody
legal custody means that you have
influence
and
a say over the child’s medical care
their education
and their religion
those are the main the three main
aspects of legal child custody
so
if
one parent is maybe interfering with
the child’s medical care and arguing
over who the doctor is going to be all
the time and canceling appointments when
they don’t agree uh that that they
should be seeing that doctor when
they’re getting in the way of education
and always trying to
get a
get the child into a different school or
they sign a child up for a school
without getting the other parents
approval those are indicators that that
person should not have sole legal
custody
and it’s also
an indicator that the person who is
able to
work through these things in a
diplomatic way with the other parent
they could end up getting an award of
legal custody there’s no real
presumption of joint legal custody but
in minnesota
unless you’re
really getting in the way of of the
child’s development in some way if
you’re a drug addict and not able to
parent if you don’t have if you can’t
maintain a home
if you’re living out of state
and don’t come back to the state very
often
then it’s very unlikely that uh that you
would be awarded joint legal custody
but for people who are
sincerely working on on parenting their
child together
joint legal custody is generally the way
the court is going to go
physical custody
is a different animal it’s not as
important as it used to be
i’d say the main issues with
physical custody are this it’s physical
custody is about just the care of the
child day to day what’s going on
when the child is in your care during
the day that’s physical custody in the
past
physical sole physical custody was
usually awarded to the parent who had
the majority of the parenting time
now if both parents are engaged
joint physical custody is awarded to
both of them
an award of physical custody
used to have more significance
sole physical custody meant in back in
the day
that a parent could move out of state
with the child
without permission
they could take a child move out without
the permission of the other parent and
without and without a need to ask the
court if they could take the child and
relocate to another state well now
even if you have that sole physical
custody award
of the case law has evolved and there is
there’s no way that you can relocate out
of state move out of state with a child
if the other parent has court-ordered
parenting time and is residing in the
state of minnesota