James Dobson Was My Horror, and Yours

TW: child abuse and self-harm

I never met Dobson, but I hated him, and sometimes the hatred kept me up at night. I hated him the way you can hate only a man who destroyed you as a child. There are other culprits, certainly. Dobson did not hit me; my father did. But Dobson told him that he was right to hit me, that God gave him permission. That if he hit me, I would obey my parents and the Lord, and that everything would be all right because to strike a child is to love her. Or as Dobson once put it, “Corporal punishment, when used lovingly and properly, is beneficial to a child because it is in harmony with nature itself.” So I can remember the crack of a belt, and the shouting, and my own fear. One day, I decided my father did not love me, because how could he, and I cried until I felt nothing at all. Later, I pulled nails out of the walls so I could cut up my arms.

In my earliest memories, one of Dobson’s best-known books, The Strong-Willed Child, sits in our living room. It was there because the title described me, and my parents wanted to change who I was. Dobson offered solutions, within certain parameters. He often told his followers they had to break a child’s will, but not their spirit, as if such a distinction exists. To Dobson, the parent-child relationship was little more than a battle for power, which the child must lose in order to become the right kind of adult. Parents should not insult their children, or beat a toddler unnecessarily, but they must wield a firm hand – or a belt or a switch

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Now that Dobson is dead, it is easier to see the scope of his legacy. A childhood like mine is a personal tragedy with political dimensions. Dobson served tyranny all his life, and over time, he sought to enshrine it in the highest seats of power. To him and his heirs, the American home is a laboratory; they inflict suffering in private to better reproduce it in public.

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