What Fathers Actually Do: Preparing Sons for the Responsibilities of Family Life

A father who wants his son to be a trustworthy husband someday has to be a trustworthy husband now. That is the central finding running through CB Rutaremwa and ML Shirindi's 2025 paper, 'Fathers' Perspectives on the Preparation of Sons for Family Responsibilities,' published in Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk. The researchers found that effective preparation of sons depends on a close father-son relationship marked by trust, open communication, mutual support, respect, and shared values. None of those things can be transmitted through a single conversation or a formal rite of passage. They accumulate through years of daily modeling.

This matches what the Catholic Christian tradition has been saying with increasing precision since at least the Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes states directly that 'the active presence of the father is highly beneficial to their formation' [F3]. It is not passive attendance at school events or occasional advice-giving. It is the father as a legible person: a man whose values are visible in his choices, whose faith is audible in his speech, whose love is measurable in what he sacrifices.

The father as moral model

Aquinas understood habit formation as the gradual inscription of moral dispositions through repeated acts. The virtues — prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance — do not arrive by intellectual transmission alone. A son who hears his father talk about fairness but watches him cut corners at work receives a different formation than one who hears and watches the same thing. Rutaremwa and Shirindi's findings point to the same mechanism: what sons internalize is not the content of what fathers say about family responsibility, but the pattern of how fathers actually inhabit responsibility.

The CCMMP framework (Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, 2020) locates this in the fallen and redeemed dimensions of the person. The father is not a neutral transmitter. He is a man with his own concupiscence, his own disordered desires, his own habitual weaknesses. What he passes on to his son includes both his virtues and his unaddressed wounds. This is why the father's ongoing conversion is not a side note to his parenting — it is the content of it. Pope Francis, in Amoris Laetitia, describes the education of children as 'a most serious duty and at the same time a primary right' of parents [F2]. The weight of that phrase presses on the word 'duty': it is not something that can be outsourced.

And yet outsourcing is exactly what has happened in many Catholic households. The Unleash the Gospel pastoral letter identifies the pattern plainly: many Catholic parents have delegated their children's religious education entirely to the parish, assuming that fulfillment of this task is simply a matter of dropping children off for CCD [F1]. The letter is clear that catechizing children has little effect if parents are not themselves living as disciples. This applies to fathers with particular force, because sons are watching whether the faith their father professes on Sunday has any bearing on his behavior on Tuesday.

What practical fatherhood looks like

Rutaremwa and Shirindi's study, drawing on fathers' own reflections, identifies several concrete practices through which preparation actually occurs. These are worth naming specifically, because they can otherwise dissolve into generalities.

Shared work and shared responsibility. Fathers who involved their sons in household tasks — not as labor, but as apprenticeship in care for the common life of a home — gave sons a felt sense of what family responsibility means. The son who helps his father repair something, prepare food, or manage a household problem is learning that family life is active, not passive; that it requires initiative and follow-through. This connects directly to what Aquinas identifies as the formation of practical wisdom: prudence is not learned in the abstract but through the repeated exercise of judgment in real situations.

Explicit conversation about relationships. The study found that fathers who spoke openly with their sons about what it means to treat a spouse with respect — including conversations about fidelity, conflict, and the demands of committed love — produced sons who entered relationships with more realistic expectations. These conversations are uncomfortable, which is exactly why many fathers avoid them. Fortitude, as a cardinal virtue, includes the willingness to have the difficult conversation rather than defaulting to silence.

Being visible in one's own marriage. Sons learn what a husband is by watching their father. Where a father treats his wife with visible affection and respect — and where disagreements are handled without contempt — the son receives a template that no formal instruction can replicate. John Gottman's research on marriage finds that contempt is the single strongest predictor of relationship breakdown. A father who models its opposite, consistently, is giving his son the most durable marriage preparation available.

Naming faith as a living reality. Gaudium et Spes reminds families that human life 'cannot be measured or perceived only in terms of this world alone, but always has a bearing on the eternal destiny of men' [F3]. The Unleash the Gospel letter puts this in domestic terms: 'parents need to have a living relationship with Jesus and to learn the faith themselves in order to hand it on effectively to their children' [F1]. The father who prays — and who prays visibly, without performance — shows his son that prayer is what a man does, not what children do until they outgrow it. Morning prayer, grace at meals, the rosary, Sunday Mass as a non-negotiable: these practices, embodied rather than merely required, form a son's sense of what the spiritual life actually is.

The relationship comes first

Rutaremwa and Shirindi are emphatic on one point: none of the above works without the relational foundation. A son who does not trust his father will not receive his father's formation, regardless of how consistently the father models good behavior. Trust is built through time, through reliability, through the father's willingness to be known — including in his failures — and to repair ruptures when they occur.

Benedict Groeschel's account of the spiritual passages of the interior life has something to offer here. Groeschel describes the purgative stage as marked by the slow, painful recognition of one's own disorder and the willingness to submit it to transformation. A father who is willing to undergo this — who can say to his son, honestly, 'I was wrong,' or 'I'm still learning this' — models something more formative than any lecture on responsibility: he shows that integrity is a practice, not a fixed possession, and that adult life is an ongoing process of growth rather than a state of arrived competence.

This matters because sons often form one of two distorted pictures of fatherhood. Either the father seems invulnerable, which means the son feels he can never measure up, or the father is so absent and fragmented that no coherent image forms at all. What Rutaremwa and Shirindi's data suggest, and what the Catholic tradition corroborates, is that the father who is present, imperfect, honest, and persevering gives his son the most accurate and usable picture of what adult responsibility actually looks like.

The irreplaceable function

Gaudium et Spes describes the family as 'a kind of school of deeper humanity' [F3]. The word 'school' is precise: a school is not a place where information is stored, but a place where capacities are developed through structured practice over time. The father is not the only teacher, but he occupies a position in that school that no one else fills in quite the same way. His presence teaches something about what it means to be a man who stays, who works, who loves, and who orders his life around something larger than himself.

For Catholic fathers, that something larger is not a vague aspiration to virtue. It is the person of Jesus Christ, and the concrete practices of a Church that hands on a way of life across generations. The father who gives his son that — through his marriage, his prayer, his labor, his honesty — is giving him the one thing that endures beyond any particular skill or achievement: a formed conscience and a practiced love.

Footnotes

[F1] Unleash the Gospel, Pastoral Letter of Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron, Archdiocese of Detroit, 2017. The letter calls for a renewal of missionary discipleship beginning in the home, and states explicitly that parents must themselves be living disciples in order to hand on the faith effectively to their children.

[F2] Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Apostolic Exhortation, 2016. Chapter 7 addresses the education of children, describing it as 'a most serious duty and at the same time a primary right' of parents, rooted in the covenant of marriage and the vocation of the family.

[F3] Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), 1965. The document addresses the dignity of marriage and the family, stating that 'the active presence of the father is highly beneficial to their formation' and describing the family as 'a kind of school of deeper humanity.' It also affirms that human life always has a bearing on the eternal destiny of persons.