I started this once.
Then I walked away from it.

I'm Alex. I'm a father of five.

In 2009, my marriage ended. It wasn't dramatic. It just stopped working, and one day she'd had enough, and the life I thought I was building wasn't the life anymore. I won't pretend I handled it well. I didn't.

A year in, I was living in a two-bedroom fisherman's cottage so old I'd painted it floor to ceiling to make it liveable, with my bed chocked up at one end so I didn't roll into the middle of the room at night. I'd leased a red Ducati I couldn't afford, because I had to have something, and I was punching it through the bends at Stanwell Park faster than anyone should when the highway patrol pulled me up. I lost my licence that day. I had a fine I couldn't pay, I was mid-separation, and I was living a long way from my kids. I couldn't get much lower.

My own parents split when I was eight, and I felt every bit of their attempts to raise us while barely speaking to each other. I didn't want my kids to see what I'd seen. It was my father who told me to go and talk to someone. I was furious with him for it, and he was right.

I spent the next two years reading everything I could find about being a man, a father, a partner — the kind of stuff most blokes don't admit they're reading. Some of it landed. Most of it didn't. The bits that did, I started writing down. That became BetterDads, in 2011.

For a while it got a run: Channel 7's The Daily Edition, 2GB with Ben Fordham, Triple M, The Australian Women's Weekly, and Men's Style named me one of its Men of Influence in 2014. None of that got me through. The five things did, and the men I sat down with.

Then I walked away from it.

More kids arrived. A business to run. The early version of BetterDads went quiet — not because the work didn't matter, but because there were nappies and school runs and electricians to manage and a hundred small things that pulled the oxygen out of any project that wasn't urgent.

For fourteen years I told myself I'd come back to it.

In April 2026, I did.

This time I came back with five kids, more grey hair, the same set of questions, and a clearer view of what actually helps. I came back because the bloke who needed BetterDads in 2009 is still out there — at 11pm, in the kitchen, after the kids have gone to bed, trying to work out how he got here and what he's supposed to do next. I was him. I'd still be him without the work.

So this is the version of BetterDads I wish had existed when I needed it.

What BetterDads is, plainly. If you're going through a separation, it tells you where you are (seven questions, two minutes), gives you the guide written for that stage, and sends you one short note a week until you're through it. There are five separation guides, a few more for every father, and a growing library of Australian men telling their stories. It's run from Bowral, in the NSW Southern Highlands, for men anywhere in Australia. Every email is from me. If you reply, I read it.

From the archive

The conversations this was built on.

Peter Sterling

The moment fatherhood changed everything

Gus Worland

Growing up without a dad

Nigel Marsh

How your actions shape your children

More from the archive →

What this is

Over 250 filmed conversations with men I respected: Olympic medallists, a Victoria Cross recipient, NRL legends, comedians, psychologists, blokes who'd lived through what I'd lived through. A separation toolkit checked against official Australian sources. A ten-minute guide to the five things your kids need. Four 28-day programs. One honest email a week.

It isn't therapy, and I'm not a therapist. If you need one, get one. It isn't a program for kids. It's for the man doing the parenting. And it isn't a brand pretending to have it figured out. I'm a bloke who's got plenty wrong, and the reading and the work helped. That's all I'm bringing.

The archive

Men who've sat down and told the truth.

Since 2014 — sportsmen, authors, soldiers and everyday blokes on what fatherhood actually did to them.

Peter SterlingRugby league great Mark Donaldson VCVictoria Cross recipient George GreganWallabies captain Gus WorlandGotcha4Life founder Matt MoranChef & restaurateur Mark GeyerNRL premiership winner

Browse all 250+ conversations →