The Root of James Dobson’s Political Power Is Decades of Parenting Advice

Today the name James Dobson is familiar to many Americans of all stripes because of his influence over the Christian Right and his role in building the evangelical political infrastructure that helped elect Donald Trump to the Presidency and engineer the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

But what is not as well known are the roots of his stardom in the 1970s: as an evangelical psychologist primarily focused on doling out parenting advice, including advocating spanking and other forms of discipline. Indeed, it was the popularity of this advice that gave Dobson his reach and enabled his political rise. 

Dobson began his career as a traditional psychologist working at the University of Southern California. But he grew disillusioned with what he saw as the cultural decline ushered in by the antiwar movement and the sexual revolution. In 1970, he published his seminal parenting manual, Dare to Discipline, aiming to guide Christian parents raising children in a culture suffering from what he described as “the erosion of traditional morality.”

Dobson stressed the importance of strict discipline, including corporal punishment — a major theme of his 1978 book, The Strong-Willed Child. That book’s title quickly became a label that many evangelical parents, including my own, would apply to their particularly independent, energetic, or simply opinionated young children.

The strong-willed child, Dobson wrote, was engaged in a “contest of wills between generations,” which parents must win — often by spanking their children as young as 15 months old.

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Dobson dismissed arguments that child psychologists had already begun making against spanking, instead claiming that used correctly by a “loving parent,” spanking can actually be an “act of love.”

Inside the book’s pages, Dobson also provided an “attitude chart” that he suggested parents could use to deal with the “sour, complaining child who is making himself and the rest of the family miserable.” The chart offered a rubric through which parents were advised to rate a child’s daily attitude toward various family members and activities, with rewards and consequences ranging from “the family will do something fun together” to “I get two swats with a belt,” depending on the day’s score.

As historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez chronicles in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Dobson's advice reflected a vastly different approach to parenting than the one advocated by the prominent pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, who — in contrast to the stricter parenting philosophies that had preceded him — advised parents in the post-World War II years to trust their nurturing instincts and attend to their children’s emotional needs.

By the 1970s, Dobson was speaking to a new generation of parents at a time of tremendous social change. His revival of comparatively strict methods — offered in a pleasant voice and with a promise of happy, God-fearing families — resonated with many conservative-leaning Baby Boomers as they formed their own families. The organization he founded in 1977, Focus on the Family, distributed content for children as well as parents, including books and magazines for children and teenagers, and eventually a children’s radio show, Adventures in Odyssey, all of which reinforced his worldview. Dobson’s popularity exploded further through his widely popular Christian radio show, also called Focus on the Family.

Dobson towered over the childhood of evangelical families across the country, including mine, because he offered parenting advice through a conservative Christian lens, at a time when the evangelical movement was on the rise. In my book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, I describe how Dobson was such a familiar voice in our house that I bounced around as a toddler chanting to a made-up tune: “I’m Doctor Dobson! I’m Doctor Dobson!”

Dobson recognized that his methods bred resentments among the children raised on his parenting advice. As early as The Strong-Willed Child, Dobson mentioned hearing about small children destroying copies of his books: one tossed Dare to Discipline in the toilet, another into the fireplace. Hyperbolizing, Dobson noted that while children loved Dr. Spock he was “apparently resented by an entire generation of kids who would like to catch me in a blind alley on some cloudy night.”

In the early 1980s, Dobson turned more explicitly toward political activism, founding the Family Research Council, a conservative nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Yet, as Du Mez writes, it wasn't a transition so much as an expansion of Dobson's mission. Politics became another means by which the psychologist sought to promote his vision of the ideal family and society — one in which marriage was for heterosexual couples only, and families were led by a strong Christian patriarch.

This vision had always been present in Dobson’s books, even if they weren't explicitly political. At one point in The Strong-Willed Child, for example, Dobson shifted away from offering advice about discipline and described feeling “angry at the Supreme Court for legalizing 900,000 abortions by American women last year.” He also warned that the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, designed to guarantee equal legal status for women, would endanger “the future of our families” and risk the well-being of “America’s homes” — which he described as “the foundation of democracy.”

The ERA was so threatening, in Dobson’s view, because it ignored the fact that men and women had clear, God-defined roles in society. He advised parents to discourage their teenage daughters from engaging in premarital sex because, in his words, “the natural sex appeal of girls serves as their primary source of bargaining power in the game of life.” Dobson warned that a young woman who engaged in sex “indiscriminately gives away her basis for exchange.”

With the publication of Children at Risk, in 1990, which he co-authored with conservative activist Gary Bauer, Dobson more overtly fused his role as a psychologist and trusted parenting expert with his increasing political profile, warning his followers about a nation experiencing increasing secularization. Children at Risk included explicit calls to action, including suggestions that readers become involved with conservative political organizations such as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and National Right to Life, and write letters to the editor advocating for conservative political causes. 

By the mid-1990s, Dobson became increasingly involved in partisan politics. He had a mailing list of 3.5 million names, and a listenership rivaling that of radio giants Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh, according to a 1996 profile in the Washington Post. Dobson wielded that power in the GOP, meeting with presidential hopefuls and pushing the party and its leaders to steadfastly oppose abortion and gay rights.

Dobson's political influence would continue to grow into the 21st century. He stepped down from his position as Focus on the Family’s board chairman in 2009, but that didn't appear to diminish his cache with Republicans at all levels of politics.

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Yet, the children reared under Dobson's guidance were becoming adults. And they began reflecting on his influence over every aspect of their most tender years.  

In a podcast called “I Hate James Dobson,” which launched earlier this year, two therapists who use only their first names, Jake and Brooke, read through several of Dobson’s books and critique them in episodes filled with laughter and not-even-thinly-veiled anguish. In a Reddit post attributed to Jake, the self-described exvangelical says the podcast was inspired in part by personal experiences, including being kicked out of the church at age 17 after coming out as gay. The post garnered scores of comments, many from former evangelicals describing the physical abuse they’d endured as children.

In a podcast and Substack publication called “STRONGWILLED,” married couple Krispin and D.L. Mayfield take on what they describe as the “personal and political impacts of Religious Authoritarian Parenting” advocated by the evangelical parenting experts of Dobson’s time. The Mayfields argue that “parenting ideologies play a large role in the spread of Christian nationalism and authoritarian leanings.”

To be sure, their views aren't universal. Historian John Fea, for example, acknowledged “all the bad” that’s come from the evangelical movement, but argued that his own father’s life had been influenced largely for good by Dobson’s teachings.

And yet, despite the rising critique of his methods, Dobson remains deeply politically engaged at age 88. His current project, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, or JDFI, is part of a coalition of conservative groups that make up the advisory board for Project 2025. That effort, led by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and billed as a “presidential transition project,” has been preparing for the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House. 

Decades after Dobson began building his evangelical empire, he has handed off much of his work to younger leaders. But his books remain on the market, and his name remains on the new center his organization just founded: the Dobson Culture Center. And his playbook appears largely unchanged: harnessing the trust and support he has developed as an expert on marriage and parenting — the Dobson Culture Center aims to provide "biblical insights into marriage and parenting" — and translating it into political power on behalf of the Christian Right. Only now, a generation raised on his teachings is also having its say.

Sarah McCammon is national political correspondent at NPR, co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast, and author of The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.