James Dobson

Before he was a broadcaster, James Dobson was a research psychologist. He earned his doctorate in child development from the University of Southern California in 1967 and spent the following fourteen years as an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine, on staff at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. His first book, Dare to Discipline, published in 1970, argued for a firm but loving approach to child rearing and sold widely enough to establish him as a public voice on family life well before he had any broadcasting career at all.

In 1977 Dobson stepped away from that academic and clinical career to launch a weekly, fifteen minute radio program called "Let's Get Acquainted," carried on a small handful of stations out of Arcadia, California. The show was modest in every practical sense, a part time production without any of the infrastructure a media ministry would eventually need. What it had was Dobson's own clinical background applied directly to the anxieties of ordinary parents, delivered in a plainspoken, conversational style that set it apart from the pulpit-style preaching common on Christian radio at the time.

The program's reach grew quickly once the format shifted from weekly to daily in 1981, and syndication deals paired it with other established Christian broadcasts. By 1982, barely five years after that first fifteen minute broadcast, the program Dobson still hosted personally was heard daily on roughly eight hundred stations. What began as one psychologist's attempt to reach a handful of local listeners had become, within half a decade, one of the widest daily audiences in American religious broadcasting.

James Dobson stepped down as president and chief executive of Focus on the Family in 2003, more than a quarter century after founding it, but he did not leave the organization outright. He continued as board chairman until resigning that role in February 2009, and only fully departed in early 2010, closing a chapter that had run for more than three decades. Jim Daly, who had become president in 2005, took over the daily broadcast and continues co-hosting it today.

Dobson did not retire. In 2010 he founded the James Dobson Family Institute and launched a new daily broadcast, Family Talk, built around the same clinical and biblical approach to family life that had defined his original program. By the time of his death, Family Talk was carried on more than 1,500 radio outlets, including numerous stations owned by Salem Media Group, the commercial Christian broadcaster that by then had become one of the largest distributors of Christian talk programming in the country.

Dobson died August 21, 2025, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at eighty nine. Both broadcasts he built continue: Focus on the Family under Jim Daly's leadership, still headquartered in the Colorado Springs campus Dobson's organization moved to in 1991, and Family Talk under the institute Dobson founded specifically to keep broadcasting after he had already built and left one of American religious radio's largest ministries.