Can I Actually Do This? Every Dad's Question

by Ken Canfield, Ph.D.

Something happens to a man when he becomes a father.

At some point, the weight of his role stops feeling like a routine and starts feeling like something else. Something bigger. Something moral. Something he isn’t sure he’s ready for.

Most men feel that and don’t quite know what to do with it. J.D. Vance put it into words — and what he said goes way beyond politics.

Vance has never hidden his story. He grew up with his grandmother as his anchor; his biological father was absent, and a series of stepfathers came and went. So he knew what he didn't want to repeat when he became a father in 2017. In his recent memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, he describes those first hours after his son Ewan was born — how the gravity of the moment brought him to his knees and he prayed for hours, asking God to help him be a good dad.

What he didn't yet know was how to become something different. In the book, he puts the central question into words: “How to inculcate virtue in a person is the most important question I confront with my son.” That question eventually led him to the Catholic Church — a moral foundation he could build a family on.

We’ve heard versions of that same story from men who would never make the news.

When Fatherhood Finds You

For many dads, it will happen in the delivery room. There’s something about holding a newborn for the first time that makes everything else feel suddenly beside the point. The competence he's built up at work doesn't apply here, and neither does the image he's spent years maintaining. And what he's left with, along with all the joy, is a plain truth: he's standing at the beginning of one of the most important things he'll ever do, and he's going to need help that is beyond him.

It’s a huge moment, and I’d encourage every new dad not to rush past it or let it get buried under the noise of the days that follow. God may be whispering in your ear louder than normal in that room: this child needs you to become someone worth following.

But those whispers don't stop at the hospital. They show up again when a son makes the same mistake you made at his age. When a daughter goes quiet and you don’t know why. When an ordinary moment — a drive home, a walk, holding a small hand — catches you off guard and you realize you haven’t been paying the kind of attention this role deserves.

The wake-up call takes different forms: maybe a crisis, or a run of success that makes him wonder what he's actually been chasing, or an entirely unremarkable Tuesday that somehow changes everything. Nobody schedules their eye-opening moment.

The Deeper Question

The surface question is: Can I actually do this? But Vance brings up a harder one, and it isn't about being involved in your child's life or whether you raised your voice last week. The real question is: What are you actually passing on, and is it what you intend? It's about how a child's character actually gets shaped  — how virtues move from one generation to the next, or don’t.

In our research, one of the defining factors that separates effective fathers from everyday dads is spiritual equipping — a father's willingness to take his children's spiritual lives as seriously as their physical or academic lives. A child can no more opt out of spiritual development than he can opt out of being human. So the question was never whether your children will develop spiritually; it's how well or how poorly, and whether you're paying attention to that part of their lives.

Spiritual equipping doesn't get much airtime in our culture, and many dads are relieved. It feels like territory that belongs to someone more qualified: the pastor, the youth leader, anyone but the man at the dinner table. But the research is clear, and so are the moments fatherhood puts in front of you, if you let yourself feel them fully — the delivery room, the ordinary Tuesday, the quiet realization that you haven't been paying attention. Those questions about virtue, about faith, about what you're actually passing on — those are fatherhood questions. They belong to you.

Things Can Be Different

Vance's prayer over his son was where the real work started. Over the years, we’ve seen similar stories where men grew up without a good model of fatherhood and still became genuinely good dads. They held their child and thought: things can be different between you and me.

The ones who followed through didn't have it all figured out, but they were more intentional. They paid attention to what they were passing on, stayed honest with themselves, and kept moving even when progress was slow.

Your children don't need you to be perfect; they need you to pay attention — to them, to yourself, to what fatherhood keeps putting in front of you.

That moment has probably already found you, and it will come again. The question is whether you'll be paying attention — and then how you respond.

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