Penguin Books Australia

What I'll tell my children...

Ever been given a particularly resonant piece of advice, sat back and thought, 'Happy days, why didn't somebody tell me that ten years ago?' Like, you have to remove the poo tube from prawns, learn a second language before your brain starts to shrink from alcohol and caffeine, and never play poker with a guy who has the same name as an American city.

Growing up, I got a few pearls from my parents, but they were usually about what not to do and never the important stuff like how to bed a princess, wangle a pay rise or beat some boxhead bully in a schoolyard brawl. As I got older, the gems of hard-won experience started to accrue, but not being in a meaningful relationship, let alone blessed with children, I had no-one to pass my sometimes questionable wisdom on to.

Watching friends with their kids, I realised that they, through no motive other than love, tended to sugar-coat life's harsh realities for their offspring. Like a Hollywood romantic comedy, their advice was theoretically solid but lacked the ring of truth.

Maybe I could help?

As a columnist for Australia's highest-selling newspaper, Sydney's Sunday Telegraph, and a scriptwriter for some of the country's most popular TV shows, including Wdters Rats, White Collar Blue and Stingers, it's been my job to uncover and dramatise the quiet truths of human nature – the stuff we nod our heads about and say, 'That is sooo true.'

You won't find a singsong entry in this book that says, 'Magic happens' or 'Climb a tree with a child.' There are no pictures of cuddly animals. The advice is not what you'll hear from your local priest or the headmistress at a snooty girls' school. It's the stuff I wish somebody, anybody, had told me twenty years ago.

To avoid repetition, the items are listed once, by sex, with almost all of them applicable to boys and girls, so please don't think I'm being sexist when I warn my daughter about the dangers of video cameras and panel vans and my son about the lunacy of jogging in Speedos.

What follows may be deemed inappropriate by some readers, but there's no denying its veracity. For better or worse, this is what I've learned from my time on the planet and it's what I'll be telling both my daughter and my son . . . when I get around to having children.

Enjoy.