When "Daring to Discipline" Failed A Generation
Love, Control, and the Dethroning of Authorities
“Christian parents who wish to sell their concept of God to their children must first sell themselves,” Dr. James Dobson writes in his first book Dare to Discipline. “If they are not worthy of respect, then neither is their religion or their morals, or their government, or their country, or any of their values.”1 In a moment of reckoning for American evangelicalism, Dobson’s words take on a different tenor. Perhaps you caught this article in The Atlantic last week, where John Fea defends American evangelicalism via an apologetic for Dobson’s ministry. Kelsey and I had a good Instagram live conversation about Fea’s arguments, but here I’d like to consider Dobson’s teaching itself.
Inspired by Fea’s piece and Sarah Jones’ rebuttal against it, I read Dobson’s first book, Dare to Discipline a few days ago. Published in 1970, it sold over two million copies and launched a parenting empire.2 Throughout the book, Dobson authoritatively claims that a host of social ills and undesirable adolescent behavior—everything from rebellion to campus activism against the draft to STDs and pot use and drug addiction—can be chalked up to parental failure to discipline their children properly, specifically before age four. To his credit, Dobson names the fact that “the American public has been subjected to many wild-horse opinions about child discipline, which have galloped off rapidly in all directions.”3 And then he goes on to add his own voice to the mix, joining the chorus of generations throughout history that have said current parents are just too permissive. Dobson paints a bleak picture of societal decay as evidence that the love of the 50s and 60s hasn’t worked; what’s needed is more control.
And this isn’t just limited to the family. Over half of Dare to Discipline is aimed at educators—spotlighting classroom management, learning behaviors, changing sexual morals, and an entire chapter devoted to vividly storytelling a 16 year old’s descent into narcotics and devastating drug addiction. Dobson spent much of his twenties working as a school counselor, and I suggest it is those experiences and his doctoral work in clinical settings that shape his argument more than his limited parenting experience (at the time of the book’s publication he was the young father of a five-year-old and an infant). Indeed I had to wonder if the book, published a few years after Dobson received his PhD in Educational Psychology, wasn’t a product of his dissertation. Much also could be said (and has been) about the powerful cultural changes that made Dobson’s message so appealing.4 These things combine to make Dare to Discipline a mash-up of cherry-picked statistics sprinkled with references to the scientific consensus of the day, and a hefty dose of what (at the distance of fifty years) comes across as unsubstantiated mansplaining about what’s wrong with the kids these days.
Case in point: Dobson offers no evidence for why the vividly described fearsome adolescent behaviors are the result of parental failure to discipline toddlers. He just says it is so. Like the parenting experts who follow him, Dobson instead relies on anecdotes to stir up parental insecurities and cultivate trust in his authoritative sounding prescriptions. Children are depicted not only negatively but as direct threats to parental well being, often quite literally. In one memorable example, Dobson recounts a story of a father who comes home to find his wife in a pool of blood after being attacked by their teenaged daughter and her partygoing friends.5 Young children are described as powerholders: tigresses6 and tigers7, tyrants and dictators,8 “vicious and selfish and demanding and cunning and destructive”9 people whose behaviors are a “terminal cancer”10 as they constantly battle their parents for power, every child’s behavior asking: “Are you in charge or am I?”11 Dobson’s answer? Parents must win decisively at all costs lest their children end up teenaged criminals.
How will parents do this? Dobson advises a utilitarian approach that includes discipline and reward. Shaping a child’s behavior through reinforcement and reward is likened to now-infamous depictions of training his own dog who, as Dobson diagnoses, is a “recalcitrant, stubborn rascal who just wants to do things his own way”12 and a heart-breakingly cruel and dehumanizing recounting of psychotherapeutic treatment for nonverbal autistic children.13 Dobson’s methods for disciplining young children are much as you’d expect: hitting them into compliance in order to establish the kind of respect Dobson claims to have had for his own mother. He unselfconsciously describes her parenting style as hitting him with “whatever she could get in her hands…a shoe…a handy belt…a girdle” if he backtalked.14
Despite this inclusion of unrestrained parental anger and tactics like switching a fifteen-month-old15, squeezing the trapezius muscle to produce enough pain that a teen would drop to the ground holding his neck,16 suggesting that any crying that lasts beyond 2-5 minutes requires another spanking,17 and advocating that parents of abused adopted children or “sick and deformed children” not make the mistake of “pity[ing] their youngsters too much to control them,”18 Dobson reassures parents that what he is describing is not abuse, not like the subjectively measured parents who take this sort of thing too far. Interestingly, Dobson attempts to make a distinction between punishment—directed at an individual child and something Dobson warns against—and discipline—directed at undesirable behavior and something Dobson encourages. This decrial of punishment stood out to me given The Gospel Coalition’s recent insistence that Christian parents must painfully punish children, but Dobson’s distinction seems to be primarily semantical. Children who are punished inappropriately may feel “unloved, unwanted, and insecure” from the spankings.19 But children who are disciplined properly, something that is presumably determined by the parents doing the discipline, will somehow view corporal punishment as a means of emotional connection, as exemplified by the switched toddler who came to her mother afterward and said “Love, mommie.”20
Of course, a case could just as easily be made that corporal punishment destroyed attachment in the first place, and the toddler was looking for reassurance. Regardless, Dobson offers no evidence beyond his own personal guarantee as to why parents can be reassured their intentions will mitigate the impact. And as with so many after him, he offers no practical helps to tether parental authority. Somehow, parents—who are given few tools beyond escalating the discipline in order to get compliance—are to determine on their own when corporal punishment has crossed the line into abuse. This is incredibly dangerous and shows up consistently in parenting resources that advocate for sterner methods, a weak washing-blood-off-the-expert’s-hands in the face of the knowledge that some parents who dare to discipline will indeed harm children.
Which brings me back to John Fea’s article for The Atlantic, a main premise of which is that Dobson taught Fea’s father to be less abusive. I do not mean to challenge Fea’s recollection or personal experience. The tragic reality of domestic violence makes space for a scenario where Dobson’s methods indeed may be less abusive than ones parents might have otherwise employed. That doesn’t make Dobson’s advice good or exonerate him from enjoying an empire built on such ideas.
The problem isn’t Fea sharing his own story or suggesting that there was nothing of merit to be gained from Dobson’s methods (though having read Dare to Discipline, I’d argue the burden of proof lies with those making such claims). The problem is normalizing one’s own experience in order to dismiss the experiences and critiques offered by others. The reality is that Dobson’s potent combination of stirred-up societal fears, unboundaried parental discipline, and insistence that parenting is primarily a battle-ground between parent and child indeed enabled abuse for countless children. And, in light of that, Fea’s pairing of his own personal story with a laundry list of “look at the good American evangelicals are doing” reads like the familiar responses given to domestic abuse survivors: It could’ve been worse. You don’t know how bad he had it. Remember the good times.
Indeed, abusive family systems do not permit children to talk back to parents. Perhaps challenges to parental authority are punished, as Dobson’s mother did, with swift physicals consequences, or maybe emotional or spiritual pressures to “honor one’s parents” silence survivors. These attempts to muffle dissent are compounded by the complicated ways children—even well into adulthood—long for parental approval. It is a very difficult thing to begin to name the harm woven throughout the environment that was supposed to nurture. Parents who imagine they are owed a relationship with the adult children they abused, and abusive church systems that demand the vulnerable keep quiet share this in common: neither can conceive of a world where there are consequences for their own actions. Parents who operate by the kind of limitless authority Dobson describes become accustomed to power when children are small, and as a result they are uniquely ill-prepared for the moment when their children grow up. Many are unable to hear how their daring discipline might have—whatever their intentions— caused egregious harm.
We see this same dynamic of defensiveness and fragility writ large in Fea’s defense of American evangelicalism, a systemic counterpart that prevents powerholders from listening to the pain of the betrayed. Because whatever Dobson’s intention, he generated fear, promised certain outcomes, made millions, and brokered power off of families looking for help. Countless people were betrayed by this, and many are still picking up the pieces. Efforts to keep teachers like Dobson or Elisabeth Elliott (thoughts on that article forthcoming!) on untouchable pedestals compound the harm and are also simply untruthful. Like parents whose fragility dismisses their adult children’s complaints, American evangelicalism doesn’t have capacity to listen to the many crying out to be heard. It’s easier to blame the “children” for their ingratitude, to attempt to dismiss the voices of those naming overdue harms, to remind people of the good times, than it is to reckon with the painful reality of broken trust.
The stakes are high, because all of this is wrapped up with Christianity itself. I’ve written before (and likely will again) about how the distorted theologies of popular Christian parenting teaching have devastating spiritual impact. Fea seems to be taking a flipped approach, suggesting that the overdue critique of harmful theologies and systems threatens to undermine the witness of current evangelicals doing “evangelical things” and following biblical commands. Of course Dobson has become so entwined with American evangelicalism, a household name known for his “biblical” stances on everything from family life teaching to politics to entertainment, that it makes sense for Fea to choose him as an emblem of dethroned evangelical authority.
But while Dobson and Focus on the Family are incontestable evangelical empires, reading his first book brought into sharp relief for me that that it wasn’t always the case. Whatever else Dare to Discipline is, it isn’t particularly Christian. Christianity is almost a footnote in the book, mentioned in passing in a resource that is clearly aimed at a broad readership and relies more on Dobson’s we-need-to-get-back-to-common-sense-discipline kind of claims than any remotely biblical framework. In fact, the only time we see the Bible meaningfully referenced at all is a two-page spread in the final small chapter titled “A Moment for Mom” that reads as an addendum. Here, mothers are encouraged to “seek divine assistance” as Dobson asserts without substantiation that “the principles of discipline which I have summarized in this book can hardly be considered new ideas. Most of these recommendations were first written in the Scripture, dating back at least two thousand years to biblical times.”21
But is that the case? It will be interesting to trace the trajectory of Dobson’s advice. Does it pivot when his own rhetoric became more devout, more recognizably “Christian”? Or does his growing platform as a trusted Christian authority simply offer him rhetorical devices with which to baptize his theories? Because, in the end, that’s all Dare to Discipline is—a theoretical approach written with the kind of authority all too common among parents of infants and five-year-olds. Having read a number of older parenting manuals, I am confident that without Dobson’s tie-in to the American evangelical empire, his parenting perspective would have long-ago joined many other time-bound parenting philosophies on the dusty pile of rejected self help books. But instead, his philosophies became wrapped up with not only an entire subculture but a way of viewing God Himself.
This sort of failure cannot be moved past anymore than the reality of domestic abuse can be ignored by adult children, at least not if one hopes for any kind of meaningful or authentic relationship. Did Christian parents who followed Dobson’s advice successfully “sell their concept of God to their children”?22 The flood of adults deconstructing the evangelicalism that encompassed a previous generation’s “religion…morals…government…country, or any of their values”, indeed Fea’s own admission that he did not follow Dobson’s methods as a parent, indicates otherwise. The question remains for both families and systems alike: do they have the capacity to listen?
Dobson, Dare to Discipline, pg. 26.
Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, pg. 78-80.
Dobson, pg. 24.
See Kristin Kobes Du Mez’ book, but you can also find a summary of key points in her recent twitter thread.
Dobson, pg. 28.
Dobson, pg. 11.
Dobson, pg. 32.
Dobson, pg. 11.
Dobson, pg. 31.
Dobson, pg. 33.
Dobson, pg. 50.
Dobson, pg. 64.
Dobson, pg. 67: “At the University of California at Los Angeles, autistic children are now placed on a program designed to encourage speech. At first, a bit of chocolate candy is tossed into the child’s mouth whenever he utters a sound of any kind; his grunts, groans, and growls are rewarded similarly…Considerable language has been taught to these difficult children by this simple procedure. The same technique has been employed simultaneously in teaching the autistic child to respond to the people around him. He is placed in a small dark box which has one sliding wooden window. The therapist sits on the outside of the box facing the child who peers out the window. As long as the child looks at the therapist, the window remains open. However when his mind wanders and he begins to gaze around, the panel falls, leaving him int eh dark for a few seconds. Although I know of no child with severe autism who has been successfully transformed into a normal individual, the use of reinforcement therapy has brought some of these patients to a state of conversant, civilized behavior.”
Dobson, pg. 30.
Dobson, pg. 36.
Dobson, pg. 38, 41.
Dobson, pg. 52.
Dobson, pg. 53.
Dobson, pg. 37.
Dobson, pg. 36.
Dobson, pg. 221-222.
Dobson, pg. 26.
To this day, more than six and a half decades later, I remember a very 'memorable' experience in first or second grade, a boy i didn't know, was 'made an example of' in front of my whole class. He wasn't a student in our class. We weren't told what he did, or what rule he broke. The principal simply held the boy upright by one arm, and took a wooden paddle, and 'walloped the living daylights out of him'. I remember wondering at the time, 'what could he have possibly done that was SO WRONG as to deserve this'. I believe this scenario was then repeated for the other classes, too (and by the boy's demeanor, our class wasn't the first one he was 'made an example of'. It was a public school, by the way. It didn't really phase me; I was a 'middle child' and the 'appeaser' and knew the consequences of breaking rules-having grown up in a culture that the now notorious Bill Cosby described in one of his famous comedy routines, entitled simply 'THE BELT'... American culture in the fifties already operated on the basis of 'spare the rod, spoil the child' as well as 'children should be SEEN and not HEARD'.
I grew up in a culture that was both strongly authoritarian and patriarchal. Fathers had all served in WWII; been in combat (my dad LOVED to hunt and fish; but never hunted again after his experiences in combat-in fact, never would even consider having a gun in our home, thought he grew up with them and hunted-he turned me on to a love of fishing and the outdoors.
WWII had a very real impact on American culture... the whole country 'came together in a massive unified focus' on SURVIVAL and unified action with other nations, to stop HITLER, and then a whole other nation whose culture was utterly foreign to us, who attacked us without warning...
EVERYONE made sacrifices; resources were needed for wartime use; so there was rationing, and drives to collect recyclable materials; and an NEAR TOTAL, FULL REVERSAL of the patriarchal culture (is the 'Rosie the riveter campaign still taught in american history to modern students; is this war mentioned in any depth?).
MILLIONS of men 'came home' from the war, to a country where ALL THE RESOURCES had been geared toward the war time effort; men who needed 'everything' to resume life-men who'd spent their PRIME YEARS of early adulthood-in combat... for FIVE YEARS...
The focus shifted but the EFFORT geared toward 'survival' CONTINUED; but morphed into the american cultural, 'puritan blessed' slogan that changed the FOCUS of men into putting the SAME INTENSE EFFORT into TWO MAIN AREAS--CREATING the basics needed so that every returning veteran, could 'have the american dream' of a RESTORED LIFE--embodied in strictly MATERIAL terms-effort focussed toward this CONCRETE GOAL of MANUFACTURING what was needed to provide WORK, that would produce a HOME, TRANSPORTATION and RESTORATION OF A FAMILY. And it was idealized into a 'home, a car, two kids, and a picket fence (with a dog thrown in)... This was DESCRIBED to me, as the 'american dream' when I was a child.
And in a PERPLEXING REVERSAL of the EGALITARIAN REALITY of war time footing, that women could do EVERYTHING MEN COULD DO, sometimes even MORE EFFICIENTLY (as I recall HEARING, but I never saw the actual DATA about factory productivity in factories largely staffed by women, during the wartime effort-but it was spoken of so widely, I assume the facts still support it). Women had not been ALLOWED to engage in combat; of course, CHILDREN never were, as well; and it seems obvious at an intuitive level, that men needed to know their FAMILIES or prospective families (a woman who became engaged as part of the reality a man might go to war and never have an opportunity to ask her, so many such engagements likely took place)...
It was under the still 'patriarchal authoritarian leadership' of America, that the war was WON and men were able to return HOME.
So the 'substance' of American culture, had a very solid ground under it-that a 'patriarchal authoritarian' leadership WORKED to bring about SURVIVAL from a war SO HORRIBLE that it has been described as 'the war to END all wars'...
I think that what Fea is saying, has legitimacy in light of what I've just written, though this is not how what he stated, comes across, clearly. I'm a little older; have a perspective that maybe fills in a gap that exists in the 'larger dialogue that is ongoing', that I'm really itently listening to, and trying to engage in the way I have my whole life; listening and trying to ensure I've heard what is being said. And then looking to see 'what else is necessary to understand, to 'see the whole picture' and figure out 'where do we go from here'.
I should have followed a model I've learned to use, that is more effective; of first 'repeating what I've heard' in a way that 'affirms and validates it. So let me do this-by saying simply-my first words might have been to echo Ericka Clay's statement-verbatim-'I truly love how informative and well researched your posts are, Marissa'. (and I echo her second statement, too).
You have a gift with words.
Dobson was an authority speaking in a 'relative vacuum'; many 'evangelical leaders' spoke into a vacuum.
But our culture was one, patriarchal and authoritarian 'to the core'-but we tend to WANT to have SOMEONE to tell us what to DO, in specific terms.
God has given us 'everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Jesus the promised Messiah', as peter reminds us in the introduction to his letter. Peter then goes on to define a 'golden chain', that we are called to walk, applying our faith in a series of what are called 'christian vurtues, that begins with 'add to your faith, knowledge'.
There IS an alternative path for parenting-based on what God's Word teaches.
The role of each of us, is to engage in 'speaking truth in love, according to the need of the moment, for edification.
The family is the first place we learn how to walk with God in love. Our faith community is the next circle of community we learn in; our neighborhood, the next, and then, for many, our school. Through college (or beyond for some of us). Then we begin our 'vocation'-our calling, in the world we live in, called to be 'citizens of heaven'-not as defined by modern 'christian nationalists'; because our citizenship is in HEAVEN, though our 'eternal life' began with 'knowing Jesus' -John 17:3. As 'citizens of heaven' we are but temporary residents, true 'aliens and strangers' called as the nation of Israel was, during its exile, to 'work for the benefit of the nation we live among'; we are called beyond that life of 'blessing others'-to one of being 'ambassadors of reconciliation; given a message of HOPE to the HURTING in our world; and WARNED that there are 'not many wise or powerful' in OUR circles. Which is radically different from the mindset of the children of wartime fathers, I experienced, growing up...
There's a lot of 'christian teaching about the family' that is not at all, following the path of 'knowing Jesus and walking by faith, in love' in how parenting instruction is given.
I remember how highly Dobson was thought about-he was, after all, a pediatrician and a psychologist-so 'who better to KNOW children and what they need' than SUCH an expert-and he was an 'evangelical' in a very 'evangelical' America. And many who now are being shown in a very different light, were the 'evangelical authorities' of those decades.
Shine the light of God's LOVE, fully on this 'fog of darkness' that emeshed a generation. Fog clouds the truth-but it was still there...
Your words have the balance of 'truth and grace' or 'truth spoken in love, for edificaction, according to the need of the moment'. I see that same kind of balance in Kristen DuMez, and in Karen Swallow Prior (who I should say speaks about 'the WAY, the Truth and the Life'-another way to consider the balance of JESUS' teaching!
I know what Dobson taught; his teaching THANKFULLY came too late for me to apply it-but that was 'cultural'; but I had daughters; so the use of the rod was not my central focus. I still remember the first time I held each child-and saw a NEW LIFE, looking at me, knowing God had expanded my heart, giving me a wondrous love for each one. They are still the most precious people in my life; I would have said 'next to my wife'-but we've walked together through so much-I can't describe what it means to have a 'life long companion-who is 'always with me' even when we are apart... my children are precious-valued, amazing in 'who they are' and where there hearts are, in what they engage in, in life.
We weren't by any means, perfect parents; but God worked and His Work is truly a marvel...
Keep writing, in the balanced, carefully researched way you do... with Paul's goal in mind: 'the goal of our instruction is LOVE from a pure heart, a clean conscience and a sincere faith.