James and Ryan Dobson talk legacies

Dr. James Dobson needs no introduction to most regular listeners to talk radio. He’s the founder of Focus on the Family, the author of more than 40 books, and one of America’s best-known radio personalities. His son, Ryan Dobson, is following in his famous father’s footsteps. Together, they lead Family Talk, a new ministry Dr. Dobson says he founded the day after he left Focus on the Family. I had this conversation with Ryan and James Dobson in the Family Talk studio in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Tell me about your new legacy project, a pair of new books and a video series you just released.

James Dobson: Ryan likes to talk. I will let him take the first shot.

Ryan Dobson: Really? I’m surprised. I was going to give seniority. I love this project. [The books] are both part of the new film series that’s coming out, Building a Family Legacy. In truth, they both deal with that subject, just in a different way. My book is called Wanting to Believe. It really deals with two aspects: one, marriage and parenting, and the other, faith. Wanting to believe that the things my dad has taught for all these decades is true. It will work. … A lot of this is my look back on the lessons I’ve learned and how I’m trying to apply them to my life.

Dr. Dobson, that must really give you a lot of joy, to see your son deeply concerned about the same questions that 40 years ago, energized you at the start of your ministry and career.

JD: I can’t tell you how important that is to me and how I feel about it today. When my daughter was 3 and Ryan had not been born, my father saw that I was absorbed with all the trappings of success. When I finished the Ph.D., the world opened up to me, and I was a professor of pediatrics in a medical school and on national television, all kinds of things.

My dad saw that I was not giving priority to my family. I never abandoned them. I think I was a good father and a good husband, but he saw that I was being pulled into other pursuits. He wrote me a letter that was to change my life, and he said, “I’m proud of you. I just can hardly believe all the great things that are happening, but if when you sit where I sit and you look back, if you’d lost your kids, then everything else will be pale and washed out.”

Now, I sit at this stage where my dad was a long time ago, and I am grateful for the loving relationship I have, not only with Ryan but our daughter, Danae. They love the Lord. They understand the things that matter most, and that’s one of God’s greatest blessings to me, and I give my dad a lot of credit for that.

What do you want people to come away with when they read your book or these books and see the film series?

JD: I’ve written, I don’t know, maybe 40 books. I don’t have them numbered, but all of them point in the same direction. They all say the same thing. If you go back and read those books, you will see that I was pointing toward the moment when you transfer your relationship with Jesus Christ to your children. If you lost that, nothing else matters. … That is done with prayer. It’s done with relationships. It’s done by saving something of your time, effort, and energy, your priorities for your kids, and it is teaching them the fundamentals of the faith.

Ryan, how do you be obedient to that? How do you raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, whenever the truths of the scripture and the truth of Christ’s teaching to us are in such disrepute in the eyes of the culture?

RD: I tell you what, the first thing you do is you make it a priority. The way you lose your kids is to get involved in too many things, to be gone every night, to not be in their face to look them in the eyes, to see who their friends are. You’ve got to make that a priority, and we’ve made everything else the priority. We’ve got ballet and we’ve got Little League and we’ve got soccer and we’ve got piano and we’ve got tutoring. We’ve got all of these other things. We have families on our street who are gone every night of the week. Every night of the week, they’re carting kids somewhere else but home, and they’re only in your home for a short time.

My mom left her career and came home for my sister and I. The feminists are going to tell you, “Oh, you should not be sacrificing yourself.” My mom’s now been the president of the National Day of Prayer for 23 years. She’s had a full career. She started it after I left home. They made my sister and I a priority.

My parents’ house was where all my friends came. We had an escape ramp in the backyard. We ate all their food. We were messy and loud, noisy, and we broke stuff, and we were kids, but they knew who my friends were because my friends were influencing me. They wanted to know who was influencing their son, who makes a difference in his life? If you’re gone every night of the week, you’ll never know it.

Dr. Dobson, how did your difficult departure from Focus on the Family happen, and why?

JD: That is a very important question and one that would take a long time to explain. I had started Focus on the Family on Feb. 26, 1977. I’d been there 33 years, and I was feeling that there is a time for every leader to let go and to let a younger generation come in. If you don’t, you either die or retire or get bored or leave or make a mistake, and then there’s not the infrastructure to take it on.

I was thinking about leaving. I was not ready to do that in 2010, but I was thinking about it. My board of directors asked me to leave. It wasn’t because of any scandal or big conflict or anything. I don’t really understand it today, but I did understand this: The Lord had his hand in my back and he said, “I got work for you to do, and it’s not finished. Don’t even think of retiring.”

The next day, very next day, I started Family Talk, and I’m trying to do the same thing I was at Focus on the Family. I want to save as many families as I can. I want to help people make marriage all that it should be. I want to help parents convey their faith to their children. I want to fight for a righteousness in the culture. Those are not new goals to me. They go back even when I was at the medical school before I started Focus on the Family.

I’m still at it, and the Lord is still blessing it. The ministry’s going. We’re not as big as Focus; I don’t want to be. I don’t ever want to try to repeat what I did there. I just want the Lord to use me as long as I’m able, and he had given me the strength and energy and health to do this. Now I get the opportunity to work with both my kids here in this studio. I’m telling you, that is a blessing.

Ryan, your dad says he doesn't want to recreate Focus on the Family. What do you want to do? At some point, it’s likely that this is going to be your responsibility to carry into the future. What’s it going to look like?

RD: I like the ministry, and really, we just want to help people. I didn’t know what it would be like. … I remember getting the call from my dad and he said, “Rye, I think I’m going to start another ministry.” I remember my response. I said, “Why? Daddy, come on, have you not done enough?” … He said, “The Lord said he’s not done.” That’s his answer, and that’s why I follow him because it wasn’t, “Well I want to build what I had before. I don’t want to go out like this. I want to go out on top. I want to have another building with my name on it. I want to write a bunch of more books. I need to make some more money.”

None of that was of any concern. It was, “This is what the Lord asked me to do.” That is why he’s so easy to follow because it’s not about James Dobson. It’s about the will of the Lord, and what I want to do is help people. I want to help them exactly where they’re at.

We were in New York a week ago doing press for the book and the film series. I was walking along, and I saw a temper tantrum unlike I’ve ever seen in my life. There was a mom with about a 16 year old and about a 6 year old, and this 6 year old lost her mind. … I got around the corner, I looked back when she couldn’t see me, and I saw the look in her eyes: helplessness, didn’t know what to do. That mom loves that little girl. She wants a good relationship. She didn’t want to be in the middle of the street in New York City with 1,000 people watching her kid throw a tantrum. I can help her. I’ve got things that have worked for the last 40 years. … I’m not selling something that just worked for other people. This worked in my life with my family, my wife, my kids.

One of the things I'm most excited about … we don’t have a name for it yet. I call it Digital Dobson. We’re digitizing everything my dad’s ever done. All the books, all the radio broadcasts, all the film series, all the newsletters, all the letters back to parents, every single thing so that no matter what, when you’re in need, you’ve got it at your fingertips.

You’ve got a kid having nightmares? We’re going to talk to you about that. Your daughter hit puberty and you don't know what happened? We’re going to talk to you about that. Your son got a girl pregnant? We can help you with that. You found porn on your husband’s computer? We can help you with that. Whatever it is, if you need help, we want to be there for you. That’s what the future is.

JD: People ask me, “How do you want to be remembered?” I don’t think it matters. That’s not the goal. I don’t need that. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his family and loved the Lord and loved the family of man and tried to do what he could.

Listen to Warren Cole Smith’s full interview with James and Ryan Dobson on Listening In: