A staple of my childhood passed this week and wow, do I have a lot feelings about it. I remember Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family as an inescapable part of my childhood and young adult life. My parents read his books and listened to all of his broadcasts. They bought me his guides for young adults and I even had a subscription to Brio, Focus on the Family’s bi-monthly magazine for teen girls. His was the road map of my formation, and was it a bumpy ride.
To begin with, breaking a child’s will was one of the primary tenants to his approach to raising children. This included not only strong rules, but spanking and other forms of punishment. My parents embraced it wholeheartedly, but I am not sure every practice he espoused was well-suited to every situation.
My relationship with my parents was harmed by the spanking. As a thoughtful child, I needed answers not violence. A calm explanation would have been preferable to spankings, tears, and pleadings. Perhaps my parents needed to go to therapy for their own frustrations instead of taking it out on the kids. This is a tough thing to say out loud. I appreciate the work and sacrifice of my parents, but I feel they were lead astray. As I am a parent now myself and I understand there are choices. Raising kids is not easy, but I realize that my annoyance at the kids’ shortcomings is less to do with their immaturity as my own. Of course children are loud and undisciplined and selfish, but that requires more patience from myself as the parents part, and less shifting of blame to the kids. Life is hard, don’t make your kids pay for your shortcomings.
The next rough patch was James Dobson’s approach to young girls and teens. I was not a girly-girl and his evangelical worldview did not leave much room for that. His approach to dating was based on his and his wife’s experiences and that did not apply to growing up in the 1990s. To be honest, most of his focus for girls was based on the purity culture. “Don’t have sex” was his approach for teens. But then what else, why was the that most important part of being a a woman? What about developing the whole person, I wanted to learn stuff and try new things. Why should I be reduced to one aspect of my personhood? I felt like the approach to girls was very superficial; dress modestly, be nice, and save yourself for marriage.
As a grown young woman, Focus on the Family focused on mothers and not single women, I could come back to the party when I acquired a husband and kids. The concept of family in many cultures is multigenerational. Single and dating people are still part of families, and I think ignoring them is to the detriment to both the family and society.
Even without getting into Dobson’s later political activities, Focus on the Family caused a lot of harm. They pitted the straights against the gays. They communicated that homosexuals were ruining the family, when the straights were ruining it all by themselves. Currently, FOTF has two authors that write about being gay, but exclusively from a conversion perspective. Most psychologists today agree that conversion therapy is harmful people, denying their core personhood.
To me being pro-family should be more inclusive and families take lots of forms including singles, one-parent families, unmarried people, blended families and adoptive and foster families. I am a straight, married, stay-at-home-mom, which is the FOTF ideal, but I also am a whole person. I do paid work, volunteer at church and stand up for all kinds of people and try to love them as they are. I wish that Dobson left the world a better place and I believe he meant well, but his perspectives caused suffering.
