This article presents a research on the changes in fatherhood derived from a judicial or extrajudicial process that regulates relationships between parents and children. The research is descriptive and it was conducted through a historical-hermeneutical approach aimed at examining the separated parents’ perceptions, whose results point to three factors that affect fatherhood: the father, the mother and the State. The dynamic among these allows discerning three disparate factual situations that a parent can face after a separation from a partner: a recognized fatherhood, a recognized fatherhood with limitations or unrecognized fatherhood. Some parents choose to implement resistance strategies to mitigate, circumvent or deal with arbitrary positions that hinder fatherhood development.