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.