The “Half-Arsed Parenting” author’s documented record of
premature verdicts, thin sourcing and made-for-clicks morality
Some say you need to listen to the tape before you condemn the person on it.
In March 2017, Dr Susie O’Brien took a shorter route when she branded AFL commentator Garry Lyon a “complete hypocrite” in the Herald Sun after Lyon questioned AFLW star Erin Phillips taking her infant twins onto the field.
When the two went at it live on SEN the next morning, Lyon said he had been talking about a footballer, not a mother; that his worry was very young babies in a crowded ground; and that he would have said the same about a male player. He had done a lap of honour with his own kids in 1999 — in a car, not carrying infants through a pack.
O’Brien stuck to the line: criticism of Phillips had landed differently because women are judged more harshly as parents. That argument is at least a real argument. What sat underneath it was simpler. She had already published the verdict.
Lyon said on air that she had written without the full context and had “completely misinterpreted” him. If there is a tape of O’Brien conceding she never heard the original remarks, it has not been produced. The sequence is still the point. Column first. Conversation after.
WHEN “I” BECAME “WE”
Seven years earlier the same habit had worse consequences.
After Chase and Tyler Robinson, nine and seven, died in Mooroopna in late May 2010, early police language and some reporting left a cloud over their mother, Vanessa Robinson.
Before the cause was known, O’Brien’s Herald Sun column of June 1 reached for mothers who harm their children and a supposedly bitter separation. “Now we don’t yet know exactly what has happened in this latest case,” she wrote, having already put the ugly suggestion on the page.
The boys had died from a gas leak. Robinson had been poisoned. She was blameless.
O’Brien’s June 4 follow-up discovered collective guilt. “We should all acknowledge that our initial collective suspicion may be adding to her unimaginable grief. Maybe we need to be a little less quick to judge others.”
ABC’s Media Watch, on June 7, 2010, noticed the missing word — “I”. Jonathan Holmes put it bluntly: other people may have judged Robinson but O’Brien had done it in Australia’s biggest-selling daily. A personal apology would have been nicer than a civic one.
The 2012 Finkelstein media inquiry sat in the same climate — premature condemnation, thin facts, damage already done. The inquiry’s public report should not be quoted for a line about O’Brien that cannot be pinned to a page. Media Watch already did the work.
THE CLINIC THAT SAID NOBODY RANG
In August 2021, O’Brien reported COVID vaccinations for students under the headline “Elite school offers private jabs for its students”.
Port Melbourne Medical published a detailed reply. The article, the clinic said, was inaccurate and misleading and had been written without any invitation to comment. The clinic (not part of a private-school network) had approached the schools.
Albert Park College is a government school. The vaccines came from the clinic’s federal allocation. The practice expected to wear the cost, not bank it. It said it would seek a correction and apology and complained to the Herald Sun and the Australian Press Council.
That is the clinic’s allegation, not a council finding. Searches did not turn up a published Australian Press Council decision but the questions sit there anyway. Was the clinic called before publication? Was anything corrected? What happened to the complaint?
A headline about privileged access had run into the surgery giving the injections.
THE HOUSE STYLE
A lurid headline is not the same thing as a false story. O’Brien and her publishers have still spent years selling instant categories. One that can be checked: “Why modern parents are ‘crap parents’” (2014) built on psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg’s phrase.
Around it sits a long run of school-gate tribes, Facebook baby dumps, hormones, divorce-as-cure, and half-arsed-as-brand. The register is tabloid opinion. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes it is doing a job. Sometimes it reads as if the conclusion arrived before the reporting.
WHERE THE JOKE STOPS
In October 2019 the Herald Sun made a story of the relationship between 23-year-old court clerk Ashleigh Petrie and magistrate Rodney Higgins, then 68. An internal editorial email, later read out on Media Watch, celebrated about 93,000 subscriber page views and 30 subscriptions. That is the package, not one column.
O’Brien supplied a familiar angle. The Guardian quoted her: she could not help thinking Petrie was trading an older partner’s limitations for a lifestyle. Media Watch said she had branded Petrie a gold-digger and quoted the stereotypes — youth and looks on one side, money, status and power on the other.
Petrie died on October 28, 2019, after she was hit by a car in the early hours at Metung. Coverage treated the death as apparent suicide. Higgins told Media Watch that the Herald Sun and Daily Mail articles had “tipped her over the top”.
The Herald Sun said the reporting was in the public interest, that Petrie had been in contact, had pushed aspects of the coverage, and had not said she was unwell. Friends and family described something else.
No responsible publication can turn that disputed record into a finding that O’Brien’s column caused Petrie’s death.
What can be said is narrower, and ugly enough. A young woman’s private life became exceptionally good subscription copy. O’Brien added one of the moralising frames. That is worth sitting with. It is not a punchline.
DON’T TELL US HOW TO PARENT — UNLESS THERE’S A BOOK
In May 2009 O’Brien wrote a news.com.au column headed “Don’t tell us how to bring up our children.” Kinder guidelines, she said, were one thing; staff “educating” her about lunchboxes and television were another.
In 2021, Murdoch Books published The Secret of Half-Arsed Parenting: Raising Kids with Half the Guilt and Twice the Joy. The pitch is the obvious one: do half as much, everyone twice as happy, fewer cupcakes at midnight. The author bio calls her a journalist with a PhD in education and notes that she and her partner have five children between them.
NewsCop found no reliable public sales, royalty or speaking-fee figures. We will not invent one. What is visible is a brand: columns feed the philosophy, the book packages it, later bylines keep the authority warm.
Blended families and imperfect houses do not disqualify anyone from writing about kids. Once personal life is part of the sales copy, though, readers can ask where lived experience stops and tested expertise starts.
WHAT THE RESEARCH ACTUALLY SAYS
The underlying claim is not nonsense. Intrusive, developmentally unnecessary overparenting is associated with worse outcomes for young adults.
A meta-analysis by McCoy, Dimler and Rodrigues (Journal of Adult Development, 2025 issue; online 2024) pooled 53 studies and 111 effect sizes. Helicopter parenting correlated with more internalising problems, and with lower academic adjustment and self-efficacy. The effects were small. They were correlations about particular forms of excessive involvement, not a warrant for “do half as much” as a universal dose.
Secure attachment is not the same thing as hovering, and it is not the same thing as indulgence. The Australian Institute of Family Studies describes attachment as consistent, reliable, responsive care. It also notes that clumsy discipline does not automatically mean a poor attachment, and that some cultures prize independence while others prize interdependence.
“Half as much” is a title. It is not a measurement. Half as much as what? For which child? At what age? In a house dealing with disability or trauma, or in a comfortable one arguing about bake-sale cupcakes?
O’Brien’s book cites research. What remains unclear is whether “half-arsed parenting” as a method has ever been tested as an intervention, rather than assembled from studies, observation and a marketable shrug.
THE RECORD WITHOUT THE SERMON
Not every provocative O’Brien column is inaccurate. A loud headline is not misconduct on its own.
The public file still has documented reasons to question how fast she moves, and how readily she judges other people.
- A hypocrite column published before the on-air argument, with Lyon saying she had not taken the original remarks in context.
- A premature reading of a mother who turned out to be innocent.
- A detailed public accuracy complaint from a medical clinic that says it was never called.
- A moralising column inside coverage that an editor privately celebrated as subscription gold, after which a young woman was dead.
- A parenting stance that told readers to stop being lectured, then sold them the lecture in hardback.
Opinion writing needs opinions. That is not the complaint.
The complaint is a working method: provocation first, certainty quickly, and the cleanup — when there is one — written in the plural.
Parents can skip the midnight cupcakes. Journalists cannot skip the source material.
