Dobson returns to his roots with video series on raising boys_63003

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Posted: 6/27/03

Dobson returns to his roots
with video series on raising boys

By Mark Wingfield

Managing Editor

At the apex of his career, James Dobson has returned to the communication medium that first made him one of the nation's foremost spokesmen for conservative Christian family values.

Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and host of a daily radio program of the same name, has produced a new 11-part video series to be shown in churches and other group settings.

The series, “Bringing Up Boys,” harkens back to the 1970s, before the advent of video, when Dobson's message was projected via film in churches around the nation. That instructional film series, titled “Focus on the Family,” put the child psychologist on the map and sparked the dawn of a different style of family ministry in many evangelical churches. More than 70 million people viewed that series in church fellowship halls, sanctuaries and Sunday School rooms.

The new video series is based on a book also titled “Bringing Up Boys,” a book Dobson labels the “fastest-selling” of his 19 published titles.

In promotional comments released by Focus on the Family, Dobson described his first film series as “the booster rocket that put Focus on the Family into orbit.”

The new video series has that same energy, he said, explaining, “I worked as hard on this project as anything I've ever done.”

Over the past 30 years, Dobson discovered radio to be a more effective means than film of getting his message out on a daily basis. His radio programs now are heard by 200 million people on 3,000 stations in North America and 3,300 overseas.

The video series, however, presents a medium suitable for group interaction and discussion, he said.

“The purpose for this is to get neighborhoods together that don't know these Christian principles,” he explained. “It's very soft-sell so it doesn't offend people who don't know these principles of the faith.”

More liberal-minded critics of Dobson and Focus on the Family aren't likely to find the videos soft-sell, however, as he places the blame for troubles raising boys today on feminists, liberals and homosexual activists.

The problem parents face in raising boys, Dobson said, is “they don't know what it means to be a boy, and they certainly don't know what it means to be a man. Everything masculine has been vilified.”

That vilification, he said, has come from feminists who hate men and from others who wrongly have taught that boys and girls should behave similarly.

“Masculinity was God's design,” Dobson explained in the publicity materials. “Males and females are different. They are intended to be different.”

In the publicity and in the video series, Dobson contends feminists have for the last 30 years attempted to make men “look like little boys, to make them look foolish.”

As evidence, he points to common themes in television commercials and TV sitcoms.

Christian parents, he contends, must hold up the model of masculinity as a worthy goal and stop trying to make boys behave like girls.

God has created boys to be more rambunctious and physical than girls, and nothing parents do can change that internal yearning, he said.

“In the late '60s, a really goofy idea came along, a really crazy idea, and it was the notion that males and females are identical except for the ability to bear children and that boys and girls are different only to the degree to which they've been raised differently,” Dobson says in the first video.

However, he adds, “The people who were behind this movement in telling parents how to raise their kids were not married, were not mothers, had never raised kids, didn't like men and had no academic training whatsoever and had no basis on which to tell parents how to raise kids.”

This philosophy permeated schools with the notion that “men are kind of goofy, so we need to fix boys while we can,” he says.

New medical technology, however, should end the argument forever, Dobson says, explaining that new imaging techniques demonstrate that “male brains are different from female brains” and testosterone makes the difference.

Christians must reclaim the uniqueness of maleness because men and boys are in serious trouble today, Dobson contends.

“When compared to girls, boys are three times more likely to be on drugs, four times more likely to be emotionally disturbed, six times more likely to have learning problems, 12 times more likely to murder someone,” Dobson reports on the video. “Four of five suicides are boys.”

Further, “boys are not linking in to life in quite the same way as girls,” he adds, reporting, for example, that 59 percent of graduate students are women.”

The causes of today's problems with boys are many, Dobson admits, but he finds the root of the evil in “the disintegration of the family.”

Two of the 11 videos deal with homosexuality, how it impacts males and how parents can inoculate their children from becoming homosexuals.

Dobson and three guest speakers on the homosexuality segments advocate that homosexuality is caused by nurture, not nature. The two most common ingredients in the backgrounds of homosexual men, they contend, are fathers who were either distant or critical.

Other segments of the video series leave behind controversial topics and engage in the bread-and-butter parenting advice format that has built Dobson's audience from the start.

Two of the 11 segments feature Dobson fielding questions from parents and grandparents in a studio audience. One segment includes humorous interviews with a sampling of young boys.

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