Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family et al has been in the news rather a lot lately, and there's been a great deal of discussion about his views on family life. As it happens, I got to see what he was actually like as a father back before he was a really big name on the national scene. This was, hmm, pause to count on fingers...the early 1980s, and my younger brother was in a Boy Scout troup with Ryan Dobson, the Dr.'s son. That was at the Church of the Nazarene, in Pasadena, California.
Ryan was possibly the most spoiled, least self-disciplined kid I've ever encountered.
The Dobsons made more or less endless excuses for his bad behavior. One camping trip was hours late departing because Ryan had broken his fishing rod - he'd been standing on it and pulling its ends up until it broke, and his parents wouldn't let the trip leave until they went out and bought him a replacement. Another was equally late because of a very long argument between the scoutmaster and his parents about the appropriateness of the junk food and comic books he wanted to carry along; his parents finally reluctantly agreed that there was such a thing as a sensible weight limit...and then tried pressuring other boys in the troop to carry the excess so that Ryan wouldn't have to do without any of what he wanted to bring. And it went like that.
There came a point when our mother flat-out refused to carry Ryan in her car. The church is, or at least was at that time, off a very busy and curving street, with a steep driveway down to the church. (When I was in driver ed later, the trainer used it as an example of wretched visibility.) Mom is and always has been a careful driver, taking extra time and needing her full concentration at tricky spots like that. One time I was riding along with a bunch of scouts in the back seat, and just as she was preparing to pull into traffic, Ryan started firing off a cap gun right behind her. She didn't actually have an accident from sheer startlement, but it was close. I don't now remember if she pulled back in and unloaded Ryan right then or if she completed that drive and spoke with his parents and the troop leaders later, but her message was simple: he couldn't ride with her anymore, because that just wasn't safe. His parents proceeded to make excuses for him, and I do particularly remember that they were down on Mom for discouraging his creativity and about the importance for kids of exploring. Mom stuck to her, er, guns, and Dad backed her up, but it was a real souring point, and later they heard that the Dobsons made at least some effort to get the family tossed out of the troop.
Partly because of that whole mess, and partly because of the usual growing up and changing priorities, my brother dropped out of that troop and then out of Scouting. The folks we knew at the church had the usual moving-on sorts of things happen, and then I went to college in the Pacific Northwest, and the Dobsons moved out of my sphere of experience altogether.
I have no idea what they may have done before or since, or much of anything about what they were doing with their daughter at about the same time, or how Ryan has turned out, or anything like that. I make no broad claims of any sort. But I do claim on the basis of my experience this: in those years, the Dobsons weren't practicing anything like what they were already preaching.
