> Rory Shiner Case #76 Masculinity

Fathers & Sons

August 27, 2026

Fathers & Sons

Rory Shiner

I think it was from Steve Biddulph’s classic Raising Boys that I first learned it. I’ve carried it in my head ever since. Raising boys has three phases, and in each phase the father needs to show up differently: Early childhood (0-5); Childhood (5-13); and Adolescence (13-18). I propose to offer you these reflections based on those phases.

First, some context. I first became a father to a son in 2005. We had three more children (all boys) in fairly quick succession before we pulled up stumps in 2010. I’m the pastor of a church here in Perth, in which the boys are all active participants. I’m married to Susan, who stayed home from work for the first 15 years to focus on the family.

It’s worth knowing some of my roles involve travel. And it’s probably also worth knowing that, on a scale of One-to-Hyper-Masculine I’d be down the lower end. Uncoordinated, uninterested in sport, bookish and all the rest of it (my sons, as it happens, are all interested in sport, and, to varying degrees, good at it, so it's apparently not genetic). If you want instructions on raising boys as an alpha-male, you’ll need to look elsewhere. As a family we’re rambunctious, loud, active, and have people in and out of our home all the time. That’s the basic picture.

Now on to lessons learned.

Growing myself up (Boys aged 0-5)

The first time I ever saw a counsellor was in connection with being a father of young boys. I was struggling to cope with all the stuff everyone struggles to cope with—lack of sleep, domestic chaos, endless bouts of sickness and the like. I became worried that either my circumstances, or my inability to cope with them, were abnormal.

I had in mind that counsellors provided a sympathetic ear. I felt that, odds-on, I’d be told my situation really was off-the-charts difficult and I was doing as well as anyone could reasonably expect. I was looking forward to hearing that my job was especially stressful, that my kids (four under five) were especially demanding, and that my personal circumstances were especially challenging. This counsellor missed the memo. He gently pointed out that my situation fell firmly under the clinical condition widely known as ‘being a dad of young kids with a job.’ The only known treatment was to Grow Yourself Up.

It was excellent counsel.

He shared his own story of how, as a father of young kids, he adopted the practice of coming home from work, arriving at the front door, and shouting a catch-phrase from the then contemporary cartoon character Fred Flintstone, ‘Yabba-Dadda-Doo!’

For the children, it was the signal that dad was home. They would run to the front door and welcome him home with all the unselfconscious enthusiasm natural to children. But it was also a signal for him. It was his way of saying to himself I am home from work and it’s time to step into my next role: dad.

We become used to the idea of work being a space in which we fulfill roles and meet expectations, and home being where we can be ourselves—where we don’t have roles, we’re just us. That’s not true. At least, it’s definitely not true in early childhood years. However tired I was, and however spent I felt from fulfilling whatever roles work required of me, I was now home to take on the role of dad. That role—performed in those days between the key shift of 5pm to 8pm was often more demanding than the role I’d just walked away from at the office. Those next three hours of playing with Lego, sharing a meal, doing Bible and prayer time, baths, books, cuddles and cleaning often made the day’s work look like child’s play. Pun intended. Playing with children is anything but child’s play. It’s serious business. It’s demanding and other-person centred. You need to enter into the concerns, joys, hopes and projects of children. It can be fun, but it’s also demanding.

Biddulph reckons your key role as dad in that phase is to support their mum. I think that’s true. My 5-8pm shift came off the back of someone who’d been doing that work for the better part of 12 hours. As a dad, the best thing you can do is to be the support-crew, fierce advocate, and loyal cheerleader for mum.

Away-games (Boys aged 5-12)

If 0-5 is about mum; the second phase is about dad. This is the time for dads to show up for their sons.

An older friend and mentor advised me to take the boys on work trips, as he had done. We had our boys in close succession. They moved as a pack. Parenting was at-scale. These proved invaluable opportunities to have one-on-one time with boys who might otherwise feel like an undifferentiated mass of boy.

The first trip was when each boy turned seven. The locations varied (Solomon Islands, Tasmania, Thailand, and Darwin if you’re interested). However, at that age, where we went wasn’t really what mattered. The trick was they got to spend the whole time with you. All the parts of travel that become tedious to adults (airports, taxis, generic conference centres) were of great interest to the junior travel partner. Chatting in airport longues, the sudden lifting of junk-food bans, cheap hotel rooms—all of it was suddenly interesting again, seen through the eyes of a seven-year old. And they got a sense of what dad did for work.

These were work trips. And the truth is, the quality of what I did always took a hit. The usual last-minute prep in airport lounge time got mopped up with the presence of a distracting a socially insatiable travelling companion. Prep-time and emails moved to late at night or early in the morning; networking and professional collaborating all took a back seat. But it was worth it. No child has ever said to their parents: “This is enough time for me. You go do your thing. I need some time out.” They will cheerfully absorb as much of your time and attention as you are willing to spend. Deliberately travelling with children in these one-on-one work-trips was a way of giving them the thing every child wants: your sustained presence.

Calculated risk

I’m told the research on the differences between fathers and mothers is fairly robust on the fact that fathers on average encourage more risk-taking in their children than mothers. They swing the swing higher, climb the tree further, and give their approval to jumping off the higher ledge into the river more readily. It was certainly the pattern in our home. If the research is right, I can’t take credit. I was just doing what dads are wired to do. I was conscious, however, that I was a dad raising boys. And for boys, on average, it’s not a question of whether they will take risks, but which risks they’ll take. If we raise boys in risk-free environments, we create the increased risk that they will seek out risk-taking behaviours in contexts where those risks are unacceptably high, unhealthy, or ungodly. I was determined to ensure they regularly heard the phrase ‘yes, let’s do it!’ from me looking at a rope-swing into a river, and not a fellow teenager offering them a substance.

The way they treat her (Boys from 13-21)

Susan is the only woman in our household. She was, therefore, the principle and often only woman through which they could observe and learn about how to treat women. I believe one of my key roles as a dad of boys was, and is, to model honourable treatment of women to them in the way I treated their mother. At the cutesy-end of this enterprise, each of the boys took Susan out on ‘mumma-dates’ to posh (or posh-enough) restaurants—events for which they dressed up, paid for the meal themselves, and were expected to be excellent conversations partners and gentlemanly companions for the whole evening. They loved it! And so did Susan. At the less cutesy-end, any mistreatment of Susan or other women had to be gently but firmly called out.

Both as a father and as a pastor I observe that that final transition is a tricky one. In this phase, the crucial figures are not their mum, or their dad, but their peers and the people in their life who are older than them, but younger than us. Nudging them into the right sorts of groups becomes crucial.

Risks abound. Either we place our sons in ultra-cloistered Christian environments designed to delay the inevitable assault of the world for as long as possible, or we think of their friendships as the unremarkable by-product of going to school. Sometimes we think of those friendships as evangelistic fodder—they’re out there, on some proximate analogy with Jesus and the tax-collectors, winning the lost. We can lose sight of the formative power of friendships. For boys in particular, it’s not a question of whether they’ll join a gang but which gang they’ll join.

Obviously, at this point you move from control to influence. From 0-12 you have great powers of control. Vast swathes of their lives are shaped by decisions you’ve made. Between 12-21 you move from control to influence. But influence you must. Who will they run with? And who can they look up to? They will be looking for those older-than-you, younger-than-them male role models from whom they are answering the question: “What does it look like to be a man?” It’s interesting that lots of church youth groups end up forming in ways that fulfil this role. Young men in their late teens or early 20s put aside Friday nights to help run the youth programme. Whether we plan it this way or not, we are in fact finding men who are younger than their dads and older than them and saying: ‘Here’s a good answer to your “what does it look like to be man?” question’.

If I may add, finally, the teenage to early adulthood phase has been by far my favourite. I got the impression that the teenage years where when the nightmares begin. Often, I guess, they do. But if I can contribute a counter-narrative, they’ve been wonderful years for us, and for many of the people we do life with. If those years are ahead of you, keep the DEFCON levels to medium. There’s a decent chance you’ll enjoy it.

Rory is the senior pastor of Providence City Church in Perth, where he lives with his wife, Susan, and their four boys. His most recent book, Forgiven Forever, is out now.

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