Help Not-Yet-Dads Think about “Dadding”

A month before my dad left, he took this picture of mum and we four boys. We look so ill-prepared for the storm that was coming. I’m the older one in the jeans and blue shirt.

This one caught me by surprise: In the past two years as my son has reached the age of 18, I have struggled with figuring out how to “dad” him well in this time of his life.

He’s not off the rails, he’s kind, he’s quietish, and he’s at that point in his life where, as with all young adults, he is looking to individuate.

But I’ve felt a bit becalmed in some of the more complex times I have felt backward in coming forward with direction or advice for him.

And here’s why: I have nothing in my memory bank of how my own father “dadded” me when I was in that just-finished-school period of my life.

Why? Because my dad left when I was just finished school. He was gone during an important pivot point.

I don’t have that reflexive “What would my dad have done?” Or more to the point, “What did my dad do?”

Well apart from leave the family (don’t worry we have sorted this out and forgiveness and restoration took place before he died), I don’t have much to go on!

I want to lean into the positive patterns my father laid down (or perhaps even negatively as is often the case for the Gen X types such as myself) lean away from the negative patterns.

But there’s nothing there. So I feel a bit like it’s flying solo.

Of course I have a daughter and she is now 25 and a complete delight. But a daughter was a different experience. For my son, I’m making stuff up on the fly because nothing was passed on to me by my dad.

This is not a pity party. It’s a way of saying that many men my age (I’m 60 next year and an older Gen X), have had the same discombobulating experience. How do we “dad” during the pivot points of our sons’ lives?

It would appear with the number of young men – 18-25 – seeking solace in Stoicism or Jordan Peterson, that there is a deficit in their lives too. Happy for them to go to those places for advice.

Not so happy when they turn to the Nick Fuentes of this world, or even the Tucker Carlsons – who himself is proving less of a dad and more a crazy uncle sitting in the corner chair foaming obscenities at various passersby.

Many more young men are reaching the pivot points in life without a father (or else they have two mothers) and it is taking a chunk out of them. They’re either becalmed or misbehaving.

Of course this is an opportunity for the church as the household of God to think through how it might get alongside such young men. Can the older men in the church take the younger under the wing at times such as this?

We read the household codes in the New Testament about how redeemed relationships work. Titus 2:2 states:

“Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.”

But younger men won’t learn those things by osmosis. Left with a vacuum that many of them are experiencing, other things will fill that void. The online world is not particularly sober-minded, dignified or self-controlled.

Older men – if you want to see the generation of lost boys take the baton from you, then you might need to lean in a little more.

What about inviting young men who have never had a meal around a table, to have a meal around your table, with your family? Model that life to them. Show them the mini-sacrifices, mini-agitations, mini-sanctification moments that no “Tidy Your Room!” moment can actually do.

What about meeting with the older men at church and establishing relationships with the younger men that go beyond the men’s breakfast twice a year at church? Put together an inventory of who you can pray for, who you can meet up with, who you can help with the life skills that you have.

TO be honest, you can do that even for those young men who do have good, available dads. We don’t have all of the gifts. Share them around and ensure a well-rounded cohort of next generation Christian young men.

I thank God for the older men who did input into my life during my self-declared “lost years” (18-25). I think of the older Dutch man (a friend of a school friend), who though not a Christian, helped me learn to drive, and encouraged me.

I think of one or two other men who always checked in with a phone call, or chatted with me after church to see how I was tracking.

I don’t want the father-absence, and the long tail of consequences it brings, to be the new normal in the lives of young men. Sometimes we don’t truly know what we are missing until it is recovered.

I believe that as the church leans into this pressing cultural issue, and at a time when the default position of the secular world is that young men start off in deficit mode (toxic masculinity until proven otherwise), we will begin to make a difference.