Episode Details

California Family Code section 3044 says that once a parent has been found to have committed abuse against an intimate partner, custody is presumed against them. Subsection (b) is the part almost nobody reads: it is the list of what that parent has to do to rebut the presumption. Brian Pakpour walks through both, along with everything else that makes an infant's parenting plan different from every other one.

Brian Pakpour is a family law attorney in Davis, California, about twenty minutes from Sacramento. He has practiced family law and nothing else for roughly a decade, which is what he went to law school to do, and a large online audience knows him as brithefamilyguy on TikTok. He is a returning guest, and the reason for this episode is that his comment section keeps filling with the same question: what does a parenting plan look like when the child is a baby?

The answers are specific. On pregnancy, Brian's position is that nothing in the Dobbs decision changed the constitutional right to travel between states, so a parent who intends to move should go while the child is in utero, because no order can hold them. On a newborn sixty miles from the other parent, he describes visits of two or three hours a few days a week, in the home or at a park, and where supervision fits when there is a protective order: a paid professional supervisor as the higher standard, or a trusted relative when flexibility around feeding matters more. On step-up schedules, his principle is that an infant cannot hold attention for long, so frequency beats duration, and duration only starts to matter as the child gets older.

Then the harder material. Brian is a proponent of breastfeeding personally and still tells listeners what a court will do with it, which is balance it against research on having two involved parents, and he argues the breastfeeding studies are less settled than people assume because of what they do not control for. He explains why pumping strengthens your position, describes clients who have used breastfeeding as leverage, and traces California's old Tender Years Doctrine and why it went away. He covers what a court investigates when one parent alleges substance use or untreated mental illness, how a rotating work schedule can be written into a plan, why arguing that a stepparent should not cover a few hours has never worked for him, what happens to frozen embryos in a divorce and why the clinic contract usually controls, and why no agreement to waive child support survives contact with a court.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why frequency beats duration for an infant, and what that means for what you ask for
• Moving while pregnant: what the right to travel does and does not allow after Dobbs
• Professionally versus non-professionally supervised visits, and when each fits a baby
• How step-up schedules build from an hour a few times a week to a first overnight
• What a judge weighs against exclusive breastfeeding, and how pumping changes it
• California Family Code 3044: the custody presumption, and what rebuts it
• Frozen embryos in a divorce, and why the clinic contract usually decides
• Why you cannot agree your way out of child support, in any state

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why infant parenting plans keep coming up
3:00 Moving while pregnant, and the right to travel after Dobbs
5:00 A newborn 60 miles away, and supervised visits
11:00 Step-up schedules, and why frequency beats duration
13:00 Breastfeeding versus two involved parents, and how a judge balances it
17:00 When breastfeeding becomes leverage, and the Tender Years Doctrine
21:00 Substance use and mental health: what a court investigates first
27:00 Rotating work schedules, and a stepparent filling the gaps
31:00 Em