Recently the Weekend Australian Magazine did a story on Fred Hollow’s daughters and their visit to Nepal where their renowned father did much of his famous ophthalmology work amongst the poor. Connecting it to Dad has been a lifelong challenge for the Hollows twins, the youngest of the five children of Fred and Gabi Hollows. They were conceived on Anzac Day 1989, when Hollows already knew he was dying from the ...

Dads4Kids is going through a period of change. We need to connect more with you, our readers. We need to consider what we have achieved, who we are doing it for and what we might do better. Improvement is always possible and none of us can ever say that we’ve got it all together. Sometime ago a good friend of mine, Darryl Mills, sent me this story about a young girl ...

Fatheroos and Socceroos – we have a lot in common. We both make mistakes. We have our wins and we have our losses. We need encouragement. We need our fans. We need our coaches and we need to work hard at training to get better. The similarities between the challenges of playing for the Socceroos and being a father are striking to say the least. As Samuel Goldwyn famously said, “The ...

I am a sook. Yes, it is now out in the open. Everyone knows now! I rarely go a week without crying. Tears are an occupational health hazard if your mission is to turn the tide of fatherlessness. I am crying for others or crying for myself or maybe a bit of both. Sometimes it is hard to know. Did I say that tears are good for your health? Well, it ...

Having a father is a human right. ‘Kids need a Mum & Dad’. To you and I this is obviously unquestionable. The Universal Declaration for Human Rights was ratified by the United Nations after World War II on 10 December 1948. It says in the preamble: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, ...

Manhood is a wonderful creation, as is womanhood. The masculine is magnificent as much as the feminine is fabulous. Men and women are gloriously different. It is only those who are obsessed with the ideology of gender androgyny who refuse to accept the facts. Dr John Gray, the author of Men are From Mars – Women are from Venus has sold over 50 million copies of this revolutionary book. It became ...

One of the few privileges my wife and I get, as the founders of Dads4Kids, is that occasionally  we get to see a preview screening of a new movie because family friendly movie distributors know that we will at least give such a movie a fair hearing. Some weeks ago I received an excited call from Bill Biddle the CEO of Crossroad Distribution who helped me bring Absent to Australia. “Warwick”, ...

I must be one of the stupidest people I know. Some time ago I was invited to speak at the opening of a local charity called ‘Assist’ run by Brian Pember, a friend of mine. I wrote the address down in my diary when Brian invited me to speak. I took my diary with me in the car but, guess what, I didn’t look at my diary and ended up going ...

Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book, ‘Outliers’, gives us all insights into why plane crashes happen and what we can do to stop them. Perhaps his insights can stop families crashing as well. The relationship between the captain and his co-pilot is very similar to the relationship and communication skills required for a father and mother who together co-pilot a successful family through the storms of life. It is the quality ...

Next Sunday, 11 May 2014, is Mother’s Day. I was planning to do a big article in appreciation of mothers, but that plan was shelved on Friday morning after I received a breathless phone call from my friend Luke McCormack of the Australian Family Association. Luke wanted to tell me about the current government’s new attack on motherhood. I was devastated to hear the news. Let me explain. The new Commission ...

You may remember that I recently told the story of Gallipoli VC awardee Captain Shout in a special edition of Dads4Kids about the upcoming Train the Trainer Summit. Imagine my surprise on having dinner with Mark Jeffery, one of the Dads4Kids Board Members, the night before ANZAC Day, that his wife Rochelle told me that her grandfather had been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross in Vietnam. I almost fell off my ...

We are in the middle of celebrating Easter.  Our children think that Easter is all about chocolate eggs and rabbits, but of course it is really about something far deeper and stronger.  Good Friday is called ‘good’ because it celebrates the death of Jesus Christ on a cruel cross, and Easter Sunday is a celebration of his resurrection.  Many people think of Jesus as effeminate, or as Larry Norman said, ‘a ...

At Gallipoli on the morning of 9th August 1915, with a small party of soldiers, Aussie Dad and soldier Alfred Shout  charged down trenches strongly occupied by the enemy and personally threw four bombs among them, killing eight and routing the remainder. In the afternoon of the same day, from the position gained in the morning, he captured a further length of trench under similar conditions and continued personally to bomb ...

In 2003 Counting Crows had a hit with Joni Mitchell’s song Big Yellow Taxi. The chorus goes like this: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” This thought is captured in a brilliant article by Amy Remeikis called, ‘Facing a father’s death with laughter and tears’. Amy Remeikis battles with the emotions of watching her father die, using laughter and conversation to ...

Well-known UK commentator Peter Hitchens in an article called ‘So Much for Father’s Day’ said, “By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home. Our 45 year war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15 year olds no longer live with both their parents.” ...

Kevin Bailey is one of those guys you would never forget if you had the chance to meet him face to face. Like most people who have served in the Armed Forces, he carries himself well in a positive and self-assured manner and yet in a uniquely Aussie way, is very laid back. Kevin has an infectious sense of humour, a quick wit which he doesn’t’ mind using and a razor ...

Dads4Kids has a big goal. The Dads4Kids Board and the team at Dads4Kids want to turn the tide of fatherlessness in our nation. Tonight over a million Australian children will go to sleep in a home that is without their biological father. In the vast majority of situations, it could have been prevented. Many more millions live in a home where their father is disengaged or ineffective, and so they grow ...

As a boy my dad used to tell my brother and I stories before we went to bed. We would even sing a song, “Tell me a story” if he was short off the mark. Our favourite stories were Dad’s Snake Stories, most of them real. They would always end with Dad killing the snake and putting the dreaded killer snake on a nearby ants’ nest. The ants then threw a ...

The term ‘Caramello Life’ is coined by fatherhood researcher and advocate Dr Bruce Robinson from Perth, Western Australia. Bruce was nominated for Australian of the Year 2014 and was high in the running, but lost to Adam Goodes, a well known Aboriginal Australian Rules footballer. Being a good friend of Bruce’s, I rang him to ask exactly what he meant by his newly minted term. This is what he said, “When ...

Some time ago I went on a retreat with a group of men.  One of the subjects for discussion was the place of our families in our lives.  Most of the men were professional, ‘middle management’, if there is such a thing.  Most of us felt the intense pressure of ‘trying to keep the customer satisfied’.  Many had put their careers in front of their children and their families.  Others seemed ...