Currently family law in the U.S. and U.K. awards primary custody to mothers more often than it does to fathers, reducing many divorced fathers' involvement in their children's lives to the role solely of providing financial support, with minimal parental involvement when the mother demands this. Fathers' rights argue that children tend to do better if they are nurtured by both parents, they believe children's normal cognitive development (particularly that of very small children) and identity formation are dependent on a level of relationship with traditional significant others, including their father. Longitudinal studies tend to support this.

The argument for shared residency needs to be seen against the view that it is generally in the children's best interest to maintain for the children a living situation that comes closest to what the children have already known, the "single base" argument. In the increasingly rare situation where the mother was a stay-at-home mother who ended her career to raise children, equal timeshare would require that mother be encouraged to return to the workforce to support her children or that father worked less hours in order to maintain truly "equal" timesharing. Recent research (cf. Flouri and Buchannan) has shown that father involvement is more important to children's welfare than having a single base, and the argument of preserving the status quo prior to the parents splitting can be based in part on how much time the father spent at home with his children before the split, as well as on how much involvement he is able to have in future.

When the two parents have earning's capacities that are unequal, then the lower earning parent can become further disadvantaged in having to provide adequate "equal" housing for their "equal" custodial time without equal means (income) to do so. When remarriage occurs, especially when mothers remarry, it is argued by Father's Rights activists that the mother's household income should be offset against his child support contribution in order to preserve equal living standards in both the children's homes.

In situations where the two parents are willing to parent collaboratively, equal or shared parenting is a distinct advantage for the children, although the Court of Appeal has ruled (see A v A) that this advantage is conferred regardless of the prior level of collaboration between the parents when the perceived unequal distribution of power inherent in the contact model itself contributes to their hostility.

Where clear guidance is provided in a court at the outset regarding outcomes, the result is less hostility and a reduced workload for the courts. Fathers' rights campaigners claim that vested interests in the legal trade are politically operative to preserve lawyers' revenue streams from this type of business. Judicial powers already exist to endeavor to ensure that continuity is maintained in relationships between children and fathers. Interim contact orders can be issued before the establishment of a routine that excludes the father from the children's lives.

Where relationships have become abusive, such abuse often continues even after the partners have separated. Where one or both ex-partners are in an emotional turmoil negotiations to ensure that the children are properly taken care of can be volatile. Where there is implacable hostility, it is claimed, this can manifest itself in a way that affects children, one partner obstructing the children's right to family life in respect of that child's relationship with the other parent and/or extended family. Use of the legal system to this end does occur. However, the legal system is poorly suited to nurturing human relationships.

A government initiative was started in the UK in 2003 to reduce the incidence of domestic violence. Fathers' rights campaigners have argued that situations where assault has occurred should be dealt with by traditional courts, and only actual convictions taken into account in child proceedings. Social policy reformers have pointed out that domestic violence can be an insidious phenomenon and that evidence other than that of convictions might also be valid. It will be of interest to observe developments, particularly now since the working definition of domestic violence in certain countries, including the UK, requires neither that actual physical violence has occurred nor indeed that any violence has been proven in a criminal court. Since it is acknowledged that domestic violence can be perpetrated by either party, observers are keen to see how relationship dynamics will be interpreted when assessed against the domestic violence paradigm. Fathers' rights campaigners believe that the lowered thresholds for what types of conduct can be construed as violent will be used in child proceedings to make allegations of violence against them on more tenuous grounds than would have been acceptable previously. Fears about the system held by some fathers are deeper rooted even than this, because a report called Contact and Domestic Violence: the Experts' Court Report by Sturge & Glaser in 2000 indicates that contact can be denied even when no domestic violence had actually occurred, but where there was fear that it might. It is such recommendations that venal lawyers can latch upon and which father's rights campaigners feel will lead to even more good dads being driven away from their children. But it gets worse, the Sturge & Glaser report indicates that it is a risk to allow a parent-child relationship to continue where the application for contact results in stress to the child or child's career: Proceedings often mean a standstill in the child's development while his or her career's emotional energies are taken up with the case and the child is only too aware that he or she is the centre of attention and somehow responsible for this and the resulting distress. In other words, going to court to obtain parenting time with one's children can be used as a reason to deny it.

As with many social movements, some of the strongest criticisms of men's groups come from other groups and activist. Some feminists or pro-feminist men hold that fathers' rights groups seek to entrench patriarchy and oppose the advances made by women in society. They believe that the biases in family law , family courts and under the various child support arrangements in different places either do not exist, or are such that single mothers are not advantaged to the extent stated, especially in the face of sexism, male privilege and power. Critics, such as Michael Flood of the Australian pro-feminist men's organization XYonline, see the men's rights movement and fathers' rights movement as the most extreme part of the broader men's movement. According to this view, most men's rights advocates have joined the movement as the result of negative personal experience during a divorce or custody battle and not genuine concern for children and as fathers. Many advocates do not dispute the former, but argue that this is due to the fact that many men do not realize legal discrimination until after they have experienced it themselves.

The fathers' rights movement is at times equated with the masculist movement, but although there is some overlap, large parts of both movements reject this equation.

Michael Flood notes the abusive strategies undertaken by certain father’s rights activists. He notes instances such as when the Australian father’s rights group the Blackshirts “terrorised recently separated women (and children) in their homes.” wearing “paramilitary uniforms and black masks, the men shouted accusations of sexual misconduct and moral corruption through megaphones and letter-dropped neighbours.” A leader of the Blackshirts was convicted of stalking a divorced mother after he and other men staged demonstrations right outside of her house. Trish Wilson, writer and freelance journalist, holds that while father’s rights activists claim they are "only concerned with helping dads see their children", they actually "lobby for presumptive joint custody (a. k. a. shared parenting), seek to reduce protections for battered women" and that they "want laws that would lower their child support obligations". She notes, however, she does not believe they are representative of most fathers in divorce cases. When US citizen and father’s rights activist Darren Mack allegedly shot and attempted to murder a family court judge and allegedly murdered his estranged wife after being ordered joint-custody of his child, Trish Wilson claimed father’s rights activists “showed their true colors” by having “supported” and “excused” what Mack is alleged to have done.

In showing they are not concerned with “children” and “fair outcomes” in court as she alleges, she cited father’s rights activists such as Randy Dickinson (vice-president of the Coalition of Fathers and Families in New York) who included the story about Darren Mack in a letter to a legislator about father’s rights. In it he included a quote from John F. Kennedy that, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."The state police were called when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver took it as a threat. Dickinson continued to hold that "they cannot continue to ignore our issues and refuse to provide any relief or accommodation, without encouraging violence from those more inclined to express their frustration and anger in that manner." She noted other messages, such as one from the forum StandOurGround that "I applaud these kinds of actions. Men and Fathers are at war with their respective governments. If the ‘enemy’ is to sit up and take notice, there must be casualties.” In a similar instance, Michael Flood notes how a spokesman for The Men’s Confraternity, after a Perth man gassed to death his three children and himself in 1998 after his visitation was shortened by Family Court, voiced (perpetrator was) probably a decent, hard-working man who was pushed too far by the Family Court.

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