How does John change when he knows Dean is going to have his baby? Does he step up or does he remain a wasteman 😌
oooooh tyvm for the ask!! i talked about this a little bit a couple dadfucker fridays ago but i'll go in a bit more in depth here. so i'm mostly of the belief that john would encourage dean the best he could to get an abortion (this is if dean even tells john that the baby is his. i can fully see him trying to pass it off as a random's for a while, but maybe john Just Knows). but let's say for the purposes of this ask that dean a) keeps the baby and john b) knows it's his. i think he...steps up in his own way. after all, i do think john was doing the best he could with sam and dean even if he was severely misguided, selfish, and at the very least neglectful and at the very worst abusive depending on how you interpret the relationship.
for example, i think he is even more strict with dean, disciplining him for every little thing telling himself that obedience is important and he can't even slip up once if dean is going to be a parent. he needs to stay safe. and in the second and third trimesters, i really thinks this manifests as john pulling the "you're going to weigh us down, you're going to be dead weight, i don't think you can handle this hunt in your condition." patronizing, but john is trying to protect dean from coming. it's still shitty. but that's how it's rationalized in john's mind. because yeah dean shouldn't be hunting in his condition, but dean isn't going to listen unless john gives him an order.
once the baby is born, i don't think the parenting would be all that different from how he parented sam & dean. raising it to be a little soldier. and dean would...probably fall in line with this even if he silently doesn't want that, since he is, after all, daddy's blunt little instrument.
sam on the other hand might be driven away even faster. he already resents his own childhood, can you imagine how he'd feel having to watch that happen to his little nibling/sibling?
so i guess the answer is he remains a wasteman😂