Fatherhood advice from dads Adam Liaw, Ben Shewry, Elijah Buol and Rob Moodie

The road to happy, fulfilling fatherhood is — depending on who you ask — paved with food, curiosity, consistency, and a love that almost transcends definition.

Adam Liaw, Ben Shewry, Elijah Buol and Rob Moodie — a TV chef, restaurateur, local hero of the year and father of the year, respectively — have plenty to say on the topic.

They describe fatherhood as a wild ride, with laughter and frustration, absence regretted and time savoured, attempts to live up to role models, and determination to create new ones.

This Father's Day, the four men share what's made them better fathers, where they still struggle, and where they find help and inspiration to be ever-better.

OK to be self-conscious: Adam Liaw, father of 3

In 2020, the year COVID hit, chef, writer and TV presenter Adam Liaw was supposed to be away from home for nine months filming a travel series.

He admits that kind of absence "is not a great way to parent".

Since then he's changed his schedule, and his current show is filmed in a studio five minutes down the road.

The switch "has allowed me to be home with my children for the last three, four years, when probably before that I wasn't as much", Liaw says.

He's not just grateful for the extra time with his children, but also for the way they've changed him.

Liaw says he's become a lot more self-conscious — in a good way.

Fatherhood has made him more inclined to consider things like, "How angry do I get at certain times? How do I demonstrate how I resolve conflict? Am I being the kind of person that I want my children to be?"

Liaw describes himself as a "demonstrative" parent — and that includes through food.

"Cooking is 100 per cent the most communicated way that I show my appreciation to my kids," he says.

"I think for most Asian kids, they grow up with plates of cut fruit as being the ultimate way their parents demonstrate love for them.

On that, Liaw has an excellent tip for "the fastest path from nothing prepared to a dish being on the table".

"Grab any two ingredients out of the fridge, throw them together in a wok and season them and then serve them with rice. That is literally the fastest meal. That is a five-minute dinner."

Strive for the best divorce: Ben Shewry, father of 3

Ben Shewry is a self-declared high achiever.

The head chef and owner of Melbourne's Attica restaurant says he has a "weird philosophy of trying to apply a really high level of excellence to everything I do — which can drive everybody around me mad".

So when his first marriage was ending, it was both incredibly tough, but also something he wanted to do well.

"I saw a psychologist for six months prior. I wanted to work out strategies, which would [help] cause the least hurt and the least harm for everybody involved.

"And I wanted to know that my children would be alright."

Shewry held tightly to one rule: "No matter what conflict might be going on between parents, 100 per cent leave the children out of it. They should never be subjected to that".

He resolved to only ever talk about his former partner "in the most positive light, never angrily".

"Just because the relationship came to an end or didn't work out doesn't mean that you can't have the greatest respect for the person that you started this family with," he says.

"I know that it's been of comfort for my children."

Shewry also keeps his ex-partner in conversation with his kids, by saying things like, "That's one of your mother's favourite flowers" or "Your mother would really dig this".

"I think a mistake can be made [where], as a divorced parent, you sort of block that history out with the children," he says.

"I've always tried to acknowledge their mother. Even when I remarried, it's just a really important thing to know that there was this history and this love there."

'It's about them. It's not about us': Elijah Buol, father of 4

Elijah Buol grew up in a culture where family is held strongly.

"That includes having children," he says. And he always knew he would.

Buol, a migration settlement program manager at the Australian Red Cross and Queensland 2019 Local Hero of the Year, was born in South Sudan where he lived until fleeing during that country's civil war.

He lost both his parents in that war before he'd turned 11. Then he spent years in a refugee camp before arriving in Australia in 2002, at the age of 16.

Now he's raising his four children and drawing on the lessons from his journey.

It involves asking himself, "How do I connect my own journey, my upbringing, to their upbringing?"

Part of the answer is allowing his children to be curious.

"Some of them ask tough questions … but that's the environment I've created, to allow them to ask tough questions of me, to challenge me on how I think.

"It's my responsibility to create that safe space for them and allow them to be themselves."

Nonetheless, he sometimes struggles to "balance my own aspirations and aspirations of the children".

"At the end of the day, if you try to push what you think is best for the children without really understanding their strengths and where their interests lie, then we are creating … damage", he says.

"It's about them. It's not about us."

Buol doesn't pretend that parenting is always easy, but he believes that the resources to manage the difficult times lie within.

"If we remain humble and calm, we can manage that stress that comes with fathering," he says.

Jump in and learn everything: Rob Moodie, father of 2

In 2005 Rob Moodie, a professor of public health at the University of Melbourne, was named Father of the Year. When he talks about his children, it's not hard to see why.

"I know I would walk in front of a train for them," he says.

"You feel your children's pain and their joy in a way that you don't with anybody else, perhaps not even with your partner."

Moodie wishes that, before he became a dad, he'd understood the importance of doing more "direct fathering".

"There was a time when I was doing a lot of overseas travel, and [Moodie's wife] Annie took on so much of the load."

But he says fathers have a huge amount to gain from "jumping in and learning everything about how to look after their kids" and "actually being very much a part of their literally daily life — not just coming back to see them at the end of the workday".

"I wish in some ways I'd done more of that," he says.

Despite that, he describes his connection to his children as "incredibly strong" and says raising them has been his greatest achievement.

"When someone says, 'What are the best things you've done in your life?' Well, having two kids, Penny and Nick, are the best things that I've done."