Once, as best man at my best friend’s wedding, it was my duty to start a boom box that played Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” This selection naturally baffled the congregants, especially the line, “This is not my beautiful wife.”

Yet that song became crystalline to me a few years later as I held my daughter hours after her birth. “You may tell yourself,” David Byrne warns, “‘My God, what have I done?'” That’s exactly what nine pounds of baby can make you say. I only had a dim sense of what I was in for, but I knew it was big. I’m glad for the support I got, spousal and cultural.

Fourteen years and three kids into it, it’s not bad. Some ER visits and one grave illness aside, they’re all intact. It seems often to work out if you keep your head down and your eyes on the job.

This lacks élan, I know. But if motherhood inspires ferocity — think bears, for instance, or mothers of brides — then fatherhood frequently inspires diligence. It inspired suburbs, for instance, along with mortgages and the jobs that paid them off. Mother wanted more space, the kids needed a yard, so a couple of generations of fathers worked to pay for it.

My father-in-law did. He got back from defeating Japan, married, had a child, and started climbing AT&T’s ladder. After a day’s work, he walked from one building in lower Manhattan to another so he could earn a college degree by night at Fordham. He earned it eventually. And when a promotion came along, he earned that, too, moving six children and a dog to Chicago and switching allegiance from Yankees to Cubs. A man does what he must.

What drove him drives others still. Granted, fatherhood seems to have frayed, with a third of all American children being born to single mothers. Millions of fathers give little but DNA. Yet even these men can have a sense of duty. Non-profits across the country have been doing things to try to put such men back on the provider treadmill. Men, believe it or not, respond. New York-based anti-poverty outfit Seedco got about 50 men to show up in Harlem last March for a how-to-get-hired workshop aimed at men who were otherwise behind on child support. In my hometown, Milwaukee, organizers were happily overwhelmed last October when 2,600 men came to a “fatherhood summit.”

Most were fathers in absentia, and most, said organizer Terence Ray, came for help in clearing up back interest on unpaid child support and in getting revoked driver’s licenses restored. This meant they could find steady work and could resume at least paying child support without the first couple of thousand dollars going to the state. “That’s a real relief for some guys who had it hanging over their heads before they could be better fathers,” Mr. Ray told a reporter.

Small steps, but again, these were men in many cases missing utterly from their children’s lives. They, too, were looking to cobble together a semblance of paternal responsibility.

The damned shame is how such men, often poor and ill-educated, must improvise a channel for their diligence. In “The Death of the Grown-Up,” author Diana West details the ills of an American culture full of adults who never took on their expected responsibilities. It surely didn’t help that since the Eisenhower years our culture’s been backing away from an institution critical to transmitting those expectations, marriage. What was once a prerequisite for biological fatherhood provided a real template for being a father in practice as well. It was a pattern of life so that men with children didn’t have to wing it.

Now that marriage has become, as Kay Hymowitz puts it, a mark of caste in America, not only are children and their mothers adrift. So are men who want to do well by their children but, lacking a clue about how to start, must go to fatherhood summits to ask.

I talked the other day to a young man, Rayshawn Hamler, graduating from a Lutheran high school in Milwaukee’s inner city. He grew up in single-parent poverty. He recalls how he and his siblings had to drink lots of water so they wouldn’t notice how empty their bellies were.

His mother, thanks to Milwaukee’s school voucher program, sent him to the Hope School. It required him to dress as a man — the uniform includes a jacket and tie — and it changed his expectations. While before, he never figured he’d graduate, he’s now going to college to study business. He wants “a stable career,” he says. He wants someday to be married, to own a house.

He wants to be like my father-in-law, in other words. How mundane, yet this seems to have turned out happily for millions of men who followed roughly the same path. I think Mr. Hamler’s making a wise choice, even if for now he’s taking it on faith.

If he goes on to have children, he’ll be making an even bigger leap into the unknown. As he holds his baby, he may indeed say to himself, “My God, what have I done?”

It sounds, though, as if he’s got the template down, his head on straight. That will help immeasurably when he carries out the long-term project of fatherhood. Think of it as our culture’s Father’s Day gift.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.