Steve Biddulph

And then sort of that's where I discovered Tony Robbins.

And I don't know where Steve Biddulph came from.

I think just from someone in my life, I don't remember who gave me the book, but I remember it really having a massive impact on me and thinking, yeah, This is really unbalanced and unfair.

And the male bashing culture of the 1990s and the pendulum that was necessary to swing into women's rights.

Behaviors.

Yeah, you know around You know having few healthy boundaries, you know, like staying in returning to painful destruction, you know destructive relationships like confusing love with neediness like there's a whole array of and like that's the thing that we're You know, that's that's the process, you know, like when you say that we've got a you know, it's like a 20-year raising Process, you know, like I've read a fair bit of Steve Biddulph's work.

And so I'm very conscious that there's kind of like a sort of stages uh boys child development across like three kind of horizons zero to uh six is very much you know he's got like a whole bunch of things in there and then from like six to fourteen you know start to kind of open up to the world and they're starting to do things and then from 14 it's basically like the boy and the father are going to have like massive you know clashes and so that's really important that there are other responsible mature men uncles or friends whatever you know coaches teachers whatever that is that that then becomes like a really important next phase of child development is that it kind of comes from this broader collective because we are wired to connect

Yep, absolutely.

So it felt like the perfect chance to invite them onto the Love Stories couch to chat about what it's like to grow up with one of Australia's funniest men as a father, about how love has showed up for them as a family unit, and about the ways that they're continuing to get to know each other as they each move in to a new stage of their lives.

When our first child was about to be born, I did go and buy Steve Biddulph's book, which I think is called Raising Boys.

And I read about two pages of it.

I thought, I don't want to read this book.

And I think there's a lot of discourse lately, and I don't know if it was the same when you were younger, but, you know, the sort of, I guess there's a lot of worries now around what's ahead for boys, how to raise them well, how to equip them to deal with the world.

Is that something that you thought about a lot when you were raising your sons or?

I did go, when our first child was about to be born, I did go and buy Steve Biddulph's book, which I think is called Raising Boys.

And I read about two pages and I thought, I don't want to read this.