Maggie Dent

Maggie Dent (born 28 March 1955) is an Australian parenting author, educator and speaker. She has written a number of books, holds and speaks at events in Australia, and appears on radio and television. She is the host of the ABC’s Parental As Anything podcast. And in 2023 she began hosting the ACAST Good Enough Dad podcast.

Life and early career Dent was born in Wandering, Western Australia, on a sheep and wheat farm, where she was raised with her five brothers and sisters. The siblings helped on the farm, and Dent attributes the farming lifestyle and working with animals to giving her an insight into life and death. Dent attended boarding school and then university in Western Australia, where she decided to study teaching instead of journalism as planned. She became a teacher, however, also became involved in palliative care and worked as a counsellor, in suicide prevention, and as a funeral celebrant. She has four sons. She also promotes play-based learning in the early years, claiming that the education system in Australia is behind that of other countries because it follows the UK and American models of one-size-fits-all, standardised testing and pushes formalised education into early years.

She has stated that a ‘crisis’ exists in the education of boys which she claims has been acknowledged by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), which found girls are less likely to drop out of school than boys and the gap in their reading levels was equivalent to one year's worth of schooling. She is an advocate for children's rights, especially the right for children to play, to learn from their mistakes, and to learn to be resilient.

In 2025 Dent appeared in ABC series The Role of a Lifetime. Dent is a founding member of the CTRL+SHFT online safety coalition, launched in 2025.

Charity work Dent is a patron of the Bold Park Community School in Perth and the Western Australia Association of Teacher Assistants (WAATA). She is an ambassador for The Sanctuary – The Hills Women's shelter in New South Wales. She is also an advocate for The Kids Research Institute Australia (formerly Telethon Research Institute).