Bringing Up Boys

I've grown up listening to Dr Dobson and Focus on the Family. I have respect for Dobson's desire to help people build stronger, healthier families and to point them to God as the source of wisdom and strength to accomplish this. I borrowed this book from my local library interested in what advice he would have for parents raising boys.

I was disappointed in the proportion of dialogue about what Dobson sees as being wrong in the current U.S. culture and how it came about to practical advice for parenting boys that is often effective with boys specifically. While I don't agree with all of his advice, I appreciated the parts where Dobson addressed particular issues and gave reasoned advice. I was surprised by Dobson's advice concerning the topic of sex and masturbation that doesn't quite tow the Christian conservative typical view. His advice is well reasoned and aims to inform and strengthen boys rather than shame them for having sexual feelings and thoughts as teenagers.

For a number of years I've understood Dobson to promote the idea that the United States is God's country and we need to reclaim it for Him again. I hear this message a lot in this book, whether it be how different factions and movements have taken our culture away from God and His ways. He cites these factions and movements as being the source of ailments in our society today. The cure, it seems, is to get our society back to doing things God's way. Personally, I disagree with Dobson in this philosophical view. I think Dobson would have done well to point out what he sees in culture as being detrimental to boys and give reasoned advice to parents on ways to counter these ills rather than spending so much time recounting where he sees these detriments beginning and who is to blame for them. The result is a book that seems to spend as much time, or maybe even more, blaming and stewing like a losing team rather than presenting a positive game plan for winning.

Lastly, I am unabashedly a gentle parenting advocate and I struggle with emphasizing particular behavior over addressing what behavior communicates motivation and respect, or lack of it, to others and God. In this book, there are a number of quotes and advice that seem to lean this direction. Dobson even reminds parents that love cannot exist without freedom. However, he still advises discipline based on punishment and rewards system rather than natural consequences and teaching behavior correction to influence motivation.

So why three stars with all these disappointments? The book got me thinking, for one. But there are a number of golden nuggets that I believe address motivation and address questions common to boys. I think that if a reader can look past Dobson's described desire to return to what families looked like in the 1940s and can use the practical advice to let boys be boys without shaming them, forward progress is made. If the reader cannot look past this, then I would recommend something less political and more practical than recreating a past that probably wasn't quite as fantastic as advertised.

Review revisited:
After sleeping on my review, there are some other issues with this book that continue to bother me. Even considering the respect I've had in the past for Dr Dobson, the reality of a number of perspectives and some of the advice don't add up. In some cases the illustrations and advice seem to contradict arguments made in other places in the book.

While I believe he means well, the overall tone of the book could be summed up as, “Let's go back to the good old days” The big problem with this theme is blaming for society's ills and an unwillingness to concede that some changes in the past 60 years have been for the better. Some arguments go in the wrong direction and as I think more on them are not helpful at all to a 2015 audience. That said, there are still some good quotes and thoughts shared in the book.