When a Stadium Full of People Reminded Me What a Father Is Actually For

I'll be upfront: I'm a novice soccer fan. But I know enough to know that what happened in Kansas City last Tuesday night was something worth paying attention to. 69,000 people packed a stadium to watch a 38-year-old Argentine named Lionel Messi score three goals in Argentina's opening World Cup match against Algeria. A hat trick. His first-ever in World Cup play. People were crying. It was genuinely something.

But the thing that stopped me wasn't on the field. It happened before the match even started.

The Argentine government formally requested that the United States ban approximately 13,000 of its own citizens from attending World Cup matches this summer. Not because these fans were violent. Not because they had criminal histories. Because they had defaulted on child support payments.

‍Buenos Aires Mayor Jorge Marcy said it plainly: these were people who had found the money to come to the game while neglecting the basic needs of their children.

‍Argentina had been running a program called Safe Stands for years, screening stadium crowds for warrants and histories of violence. In 2023, they expanded it to include parents who owe child support. More than four million spectators have been screened across more than 1,300 matches since then. And now they were asking the United States to hold that same standard at the biggest sporting event on the planet.

‍Read that again. A government looked its citizens in the eye and said: If you will not provide for your own children, you don't get a seat in this stadium.

Today, Dr. Kathy and I talked about it. Because what Argentina did isn't really about soccer. It's about something much older and more important than any game: the question of what a father is actually for, and what happens to children and to a culture when fathers disappear.

What Dads Build (That Nobody Talks About)

Here's something our culture is genuinely bad at saying out loud: dads build things in their children that nobody else can build in quite the same way.

‍I don't mean financially, though that matters. I mean the interior architecture of a child, who they believe they are, whether they trust the world, whether they feel like they come from somewhere solid. Dr. Kathy puts it in terms of the five core needs every child has: security, identity, belonging, purpose, and competence. And she's clear that security comes first. Always first. It's the foundation on which everything else is built.

A father's presence, his steady, reliable, showing up presence, is one of the most powerful ways that foundational need gets answered. Not perfectly. Not without bumbling it sometimes. But consistently.

Dr. Kathy told me something I keep turning over in my mind: when dads read to their sons, boys become readers. When dads model that a man can be tender, that strength and sensitivity aren't opposites, and that you can love God without embarrassment, boys stop being afraid of their own hearts. When a father stays home to support the mother, the children don't just gain a dad. They gain an image of what marriage looks like, what a man under pressure looks like, what it means to handle shame and failure and grief without disappearing.

‍"One of the most important things a dad might model," she said, "is being imperfect, and how you handle it."

‍That hit me. Because I spend a lot of energy trying to be the dad who doesn't mess up, when what my kids might actually need is to see the dad who messes up and then does something with it. Who asks for forgiveness. Who doesn't crumble? Who shows them that a man can be wrong and still be worth following.

‍Our culture has quietly agreed to the opposite story. Sitcoms write dads as punchlines. Ads treat us as incompetent. I've stood in an emergency room with one of my kids and had to text my wife to remember their exact birthday, and in that moment, the script in my head proved I was failing. Not that I could tell you a hundred other things about that child, what makes them feel seen, what they're afraid of, what they reach for when they're nervous. Just that I'd fumbled the easy facts. We've been handed a story that says dads are optional, that real parenting belongs to someone else, and a lot of us have been walking around carrying that story without questioning whether it's actually true.

It isn't. And Argentina, in their imperfect, secular, politically complicated way, just said so in front of the whole world.

The Dad Who Kept the Road in View

There is a story in Luke 15 that has been preached ten thousand times as the story of the prodigal son, the younger brother who took his inheritance, wished his father dead, burned through everything in a foreign country, and eventually came to his senses in a pig pen. The repentance, the return, the father running, it's a story about grace and it's beautiful.

But read it again slowly, because there's something in it that usually gets skipped.

‍The father doesn't chase the son when he leaves. He doesn't send messengers or freeze in panic or turn bitter. He stays. He tends to the older son. He keeps the household going. And then, when the younger son is still far off, still just a shape on the horizon, the father sees him.

He was looking. He had never stopped looking.

I keep thinking about what it takes to watch a road when nothing is coming down it. To keep faith in someone who has given you very little reason to. To be there, not chasing, not controlling, just present and steady and ready, for whenever the moment of return arrives. That is not passive. That is one of the hardest things a human being can do. The father in that story isn't a background character. He is the story. His watching is what makes the return possible.

The prophet Malachi closes the entire Old Testament with a single, arresting hope: God will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. Not military victory. Not political restoration. This. The thread that God identifies as most likely to unravel a civilization, and most likely to hold it together, is the relationship between fathers and their kids.

‍What Argentina did, with all its imperfect political messiness, was point to that same thread and say: we see it too. We are not going to pretend that it doesn't matter. If you will not show up for your child, you don't get to come to the game.

‍I think that's worth something. Even when the source is unexpected. Especially when the source is unexpected.

What We Actually Mean When We Say "Be a Good Man"

When I asked Dr. Kathy what healthy masculinity looks like, the kind that actually serves children, that forms them rather than damages them, she laughed at my list of things I don't enjoy (cage fights, chopping wood, excessive sweating) and then said something I wasn't expecting.

She said: Don't look at the billboard. Look to the Bible.

‍The billboard masculinity is loud and narrow with physical dominance, emotional unavailability, and strength as intimidation. The biblical picture is harder to describe because it holds more things at once. It is a man who provides and protects, but through care rather than control. Who loves God and is not ashamed of being known for it. He owns his failures, not with self-hatred, but with accountability. Who leads with humility and with strength at the same time, which is far rarer and more compelling than either one alone.

That kind of man raises kids who believe they come from somewhere solid. Kids who have a picture of what a human being can be as they try to become what God made them to be. Dr. Kathy and Dr. Jeff Myers go deep on this in Raising Gender-Confident Kids, there's an entire chapter on raising sons to be godly men and another on raising daughters to be godly women, and both of them push back on the cultural noise with something much more grounded and specific.

Messi is, of all things, a decent real-world example of some of this. He's been public about the fact that his children have made him more grounded as a man in an impossibly pressured world. When you see him with his kids in public, the tenderness is obvious and unperformed. He likes them. He's choosing them. In a world that would let him disappear into celebrity and not think twice about it, he keeps turning back toward home.

That's the image. Not the goals. The turning back toward home.

If you're the parent who needs a specific move to try tonight: Here it is. At some point in the next 24 hours, dinner, a drive, before bed, ask your child one question you actually don't know the answer to. Not "how was your day?" Something real: What's the hardest part of being your age right now? Or: Is there something you wish I understood about you that I don't seem to? Then don't answer for them. Don't fix it. Don't immediately reassure. Just stay in it with them for ninety seconds longer than feels comfortable. That staying, that willingness to be present in what's hard without rushing to resolve it, is what watching the road looks like on an ordinary Monday. Do it once. See what happens.