A Heartfelt Salute to Dr. Dobson

On Thursday, August 21, 2025, when I heard about the death of Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder and chairman emeritus of Focus on the Family, my first thought was one of absolute thanksgiving. I thanked God for such a mighty Christian leader. I was so grateful for this biblically based child psychologist who served as a true role model, teaching an entire generation what it meant to be a loving and dedicated parent.

Later in the day on Thursday, we heard a discussion about Dr. Dobson’s passing on American Family Radio (AFR), as my husband and I were heading to the gym to watch one of our grandchildren play volleyball. To be honest, my initial reaction was to look at my husband of 46 years and say, “I thank God for Dr. Dobson because without him, I might not have survived motherhood.”

I made that remark somewhat sarcastically, but in truth, Dr. Dobson most certainly helped me stay sane in the midst of the overwhelming task of raising our oldest child, Jacob. Without his teachings on raising a strong-willed child found within the pages of his bestseller, The Strong-Willed Child, I shudder to think what our family would have looked like over the years.

To help explain our life back then as brand-new parents, Jacob was the first grandchild on both sides of our family, and as such, he was lavished with love and attention from his first day on earth. The summer after he turned two, I can recall coming home to Tampa, Florida, after a long visit with his grandparents and extremely large, extended family in North Mississippi. That visit had been filled with lots of love, laughter, attention, and gifts from grandparents, a couple of great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and countless friends.

Needless to say, Jacob had the time of his life, and he wanted the good times to keep rolling after we made it home to our apartment on MacDill Air Force Base. In fact, every time he spoke, Jacob dramatically paused and waited for me to ooh and aah like the folks up in Mississippi had done. Literally, more than a dozen people sat in a room waiting on his every word; that’s how beloved Jacob was (and is) to our family.

But in the simplest of terms, he had been pampered and spoiled mightily and wanted the spoiling to continue. So, reality hit hard when we pulled out the good ‘ol behavior charts from Dr. Dobson’s materials to establish some realistic goals and help incentivize Jacob to choose to listen and obey … his parents.

It was not an easy, quick fix. It was a hard grind of consistency and determination, a battle of wills: My determination to help Jacob become the man God had designed him to be and Jacob’s strong-willed desire to have his own way. To be honest, it was an ugly time filled with moments where I learned exactly how unlike Christ I really was as a mother, wife, and child of God.

Navigating that ugly reality is exactly when I began to love Dr. Dobson so much. He did not pull any punches about the battles we were fighting as Christ-centered parents, on the good days and the bad ones.

Even now, I clearly recall the honesty and candor with which Dr. Dobson shared his own family’s struggles. Through the years, there is also no telling how many times I shared the scenario of how one person’s bad attitude can so easily affect those around them by retelling Dr. Dobson’s tale of how his own bad attitude had a chain reaction – immediately affecting his wife’s attitude and behavior, then, in turn their daughter’s, their son’s, and even their sweet pet dachshund.

For over 40 years, I have shared that story with fellow moms, my coworkers, and even my students, reminding them that negativity is contagious, but so is gratitude and kindness. In today’s emotionally charged and often falsely portrayed social media representation of everyday life, that message is needed now more than ever.

In fact, during April 2025, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey among teens, ages 13 to 17, and found that almost half of those polled (48%) believe that social media has a negative impact on people their age. But ironically, only 14% of those same teens thought that social media had a negative impact on them personally.

In an April 24, 2025, article in Psychology Today, Dr. Kurt W. Ela surmised that this strange research contradiction in Pew’s poll could be the result of several scenarios, including the “better than average effect, also known as BTAE,” a psychological tendency in which people of all ages feel they are faring better than most other individuals. Ela also suggested the disparity in research statistics could be due to adolescent cognitive dissonance or simply “old-fashioned denial.”

I concur because I know from experience that denial is a powerful and destructive state of thinking. But sadly, it’s one thing that lots of people (teens and parents included) tend to fall back on when situations get tough.

And therein lies another lesson that this 63-year-old mother and grandmother learned a long time ago from the iconic Dr. Dobson and his Bible-based version of child psychology: “A child identifies his parents with God, whether or not the parents want that role. Most children ‘see’ God the way they perceive their earthly fathers.”

Or as Dr. Dobson also phrased it, “The footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones his parents thought they covered up.”

So, yes, I thank Dr. James Dobson from the bottom of my heart for not only helping me raise a strong-willed child but for showing me that the mother of that child needed to first conform her own heart to that of her Savior, Jesus Christ. He made it plain to see that if I wanted to raise a godly man, then I had to truly be a godly woman.

And I thank God for the ultimate lesson that I learned from Dr. Dobson: Our strong-willed children, yours and mine, were designed exactly as God purposed. They were not designed for our own selfish purposes or desires. They were created “for such a time as this.”

So, thank You, God, for using a Christian child psychologist to remind me even now that my role as a Christian parent (and grandparent) is to simply help shape my precious children’s will to conform to that of Christ.

That is successful parenting, and that was what Dr. James C. Dobson dedicated his life to teaching: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it,” (Proverbs 22:6).

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