James Dobson, author and child psychologist who told millions of evangelicals how to raise children and order their families, died on August 21 at the age of 89.
Dobson believed in strict-but-loving discipline and obedience, which he held out as the antidote to America’s cultural permissiveness and slide toward moral chaos and social disorder.
The founder of Focus on the Family, Dobson wrote more than a dozen books, including Dare to Discipline, Parenting Isn’t for Cowards, and The Strong-Willed Child, and answered questions on radio programs broadcast on thousands of stations across the United States.
His advice was embraced by Christian parents who were eager to hear from a medical professional who also upheld traditional family values. By the mid-1990s, Focus on the Family received upwards of 12,000 letters, emails, and phone calls every day.
“For nearly five decades, he was one of the most influential Christian leaders in our country,” evangelist Franklin Graham wrote in a tribute on social media. “Dr. Dobson was a staunch defender of the family and stood for morality and Biblical values as much as any person in our country’s history.”
Dobson appeared on the cover of Christianity Today in 1982. The profile called him the “one man behind the profamily phenomenon,” working to “snatch the tottering institution” of the traditional family “from the brink of the grave.”
Part of Dobson’s power, the magazine noted, was his gentleness and moderation.
“His writings have a sensible tone,” wrote Rodney Clapp. “He rejects extremes, fishes methodically for the ‘logical middle,’ advocates being open-minded but not letting ‘brains leak out.’”
He grew more political as time went on. Dobson also had a large political impact, mobilizing Christians to vote for conservative candidates who prioritized opposition to abortion, pornography, and the social acceptance of homosexuality.
The activism was not always welcome. The late Michael Gerson, a conservative political columnist who became a speech writer for President George W. Bush, complained Dobson was “a moralist and a populist” who didn’t understand the complexities of politics but went around “demanding rapid, immediate progress to fit a flaming moral vision.”
Critics have also accused Dobson of replacing the gospel with “family values.” Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez argued that evangelicals were “inspired by men like James Dobson” to embrace an ideology of militant masculinity in the home and in politics.
Some critics of Dobson’s politics, however, nonetheless praised the positive impact of his parenting advice. Historian John Fea noted that Dobson’s ministry had a transformative effect on his father.
“Dobson taught my father that he should exercise paternal discipline because children had strong wills that needed breaking, but that such discipline should never be delivered in a spirit of anger,” Fea wrote in The Atlantic. “For all the bad that’s come out of this movement, there are still countless stories of personal transformation leading people to become better parents, better spouses, and better members of their communities.”
Dobson was born in Louisiana on April 21, 1936. He was the only child of Myrtle and James Dobson Sr., traveling evangelists with the Church of the Nazarene.
Dobson recalled being close to his parents. He said he was heartbroken when they left him with an aunt so they could travel to tent meetings and revivals around the Southwest and in the Great Plains states. As a young boy, he started acting out.
“I was kind of a troublemaker in church and in the neighborhood,” he told biographer Dale Buss. “I can look back and see that apparently I had felt abandoned even though I wasn’t angry with my parents.”
When Dobson was six, his mother decided to stay home to raise him. She doted on him but was also a strict disciplinarian. She especially would not tolerate sassiness, Dobson said.
When he started rebelling as a teenager, Dobson’s father stopped traveling so he could have a larger parenting role. The family moved to Texas, where the elder Dobson took a job as a pastor.
“He came home and canceled four years of meetings with one stroke,” Dobson said. “He took a church in order to be home with me. He saved me.”
He considered following his parents into ministry but was inspired by his classes at Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) to study psychology. Dobson went on to earn a doctorate at the University of Southern California medical school and do academic research at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. He oversaw a $5 million study of dietary treatment of children with a rare genetic disorder that caused developmental disabilities, and he wrote multiple scientific articles and a textbook.
At the same time, Dobson became acutely concerned with family structures. He was alarmed by the growing number of children born out of wedlock, the frequency and ease of divorce, and how many kids were sent to daycare. Views on sex were changing rapidly—and respect for authority seemed to just disintegrate.
The cultural transformations of the 1960s were, according to Dobson, wrecking families and harming children.
“All those things assaulted family life,” Dobson said. “I was watching everything I cared about being mocked and vilified, and it gave me this passion to do something to protect and preserve it.”
He started teaching a Sunday school class answering the questions of young parents and then decided to write a book. He dashed off Dare to Discipline in six months.
“Children thrive best in an atmosphere of genuine love, undergirded by reasonable, consistent discipline,” Dobson wrote in the introduction. “In a day of widespread drug usage, immorality, civil disobedience, vandalism, and violence, we must not depend on hope and luck to fashion the critical attitudes we value in our children. … Permissiveness has not just been a failure; it’s been a disaster!”
The book sold 2 million copies in 22 years. An updated edition, released in 1992, has sold another 1.5 million.
Dobson launched Focus on the Family as a 15-minute, weekly radio program in 1977. Early listeners found the psychologist couldn’t say much in that time, though, and often barely made it through a question. The producers revamped the format in 1981, turning the show into a daily, half-hour conversation with Gilbert Moegerle, an experienced host and father of three.
Focus on the Family was then packaged and distributed with Chuck Swindoll’s half-hour program, Insight for Living, and the show took off. By 1982, Dobson was on 800 Christian radio stations every day. By the 1990s, when Focus on the Family moved from Southern California to Colorado Springs, the ministry had to to hire 350 people to respond to the daily mail.
Focus on the Family expanded into a $140 million multimedia enterprise, with books, magazines, television shows, and, of course, a slate of popular radio programs that reached an estimated 220 million people in more than 150 countries.
Perhaps the most influential program was Adventures in Odyssey, a radio drama narrating the adventures of a group of youngsters who hang out at a small-town soda shop and ice cream emporium, learning life lessons from the grandfatherly proprietor and inventor, John Avery Whittaker. The show became one of the most-listened-to programs on Christian radio and “an important cultural touchpoint for many evangelicals of a certain age,” according to Relevant magazine.
Dobson also founded Family Research Council, a political think tank and advocacy organization. Dobson was always interested in American politics but became more active and outspoken in the 1990s.
He was deeply offended by President Bill Clinton’s immorality—and the fact that the country seemed to only care about the state of the economy. He started regularly urging listeners to call Congress, the White House, or particular government agencies to make their voices heard.
Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who went on to become a TV commentator, recalled that Dobson’s listeners “melted down our phone lines” over an education bill. Democratic leader Tom Daschle’s staff reportedly decided to change the office phone number after thousands of Dobson’s listeners clogged lines to protest a procedural maneuver he was making in the senate.
Dobson told CT that he could not tolerate Christian “isolationism” when the stakes were so high.
“Hanging in the balance is the essence of the Christian faith—purity, reverence for life, family stability, love for God, and receptivity to the gospel itself,” he wrote. “We can’t afford to tremble now!”
Dobson endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in 2004, backing George W. Bush’s reelection bid and urging the president to support a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. He turned leadership of Focus of the Family over to Jim Daly, the current president, the following year.
Dobson launched a new radio show, Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, and started the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, where he continued to speak out on political issues.
“Nobody … has done as much to align evangelicalism with hard-nosed partisan politics,” CT reported in 2006. “‘Family’ no longer goes with baseball and apple pie. It has become a fighting word, and a politicized one at that.”
Dobson said he knew his political activities offended people and many evangelicals wanted him to stick to parenting advice. He couldn’t accept that, he said, when America was locked in a “civil war of values.”
“Do we as Christians need to be liked so badly,” he asked, “that we choose to remain silent in response to the killing of babies, the spreading of homosexual propaganda to our children, the distribution of condoms and immoral advice to our teenagers, and the undermining of marriage as an institution? Would Jesus have ignored these wicked activities?”
In his final years, Dobson was a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump. Dobson said that while he shared many evangelicals’ concerns about Trump’s private behavior and caustic rhetoric, the candidate’s commitment to support pro-life justices to the Supreme Court mattered more than anything else.
The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, after Trump appointed justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, proved that was the right decision, Dobson said.
Dobson is survived by his wife, Shirley, and their children, Danae and Ryan.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Tom Daschale’s party affiliation. He is a Democrat.
