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.
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.