Dads A–Z

The door slams. The answers at the dinner table shrink to one word. A note comes home from school, or a phone turns up something you wish you had not seen — and you have until bedtime to work out what to do.

Dads A–Z is a handbook for exactly those moments, written for fathers of children aged ten to eighteen. Its twenty-six entries — Anxiety, Boundaries & Bullying, Communication, Dating, Exams, Friendships, Money, Online Life, Puberty, Substances, Time & Screens, When to Worry, and the rest of the alphabet — each follow the same five-part shape, so you always know where to look: What it is (what is actually going on underneath the noise), What to do (steps you can take tonight, this week, and this month), What to say (word-for-word scripts to borrow until your own words come), Watch-fors (the signs a problem has outgrown a handbook, and where the professional help is), and See also (the connected entries, because problems travel in packs).

Every entry is calibrated across the three age bands of the decade — 10–12, 13–15, and 16–18 — because the right move for an eleven-year-old is rarely the right move for a seventeen-year-old, and your own job changes with them: manager, then coach, then consultant. Appendix A compresses each band into quick-reference tables for the school-morning scan. Appendix B gathers the book’s scripts into one fast-lookup library. Appendix C gives you the framework for finding real help where you live, ending with a fill-in family help card.

This is a handbook, not a memoir and not a lecture: 323 pages, just over 100,000 words, no statistics for show and no promises — patterns, procedures, and words that fit in a father’s mouth, for the dad who is trying again tomorrow.