Focus on the Family has advice for estranged parents. An apology isn’t part of it.

The conservative Christian ministry refuses to acknowledge how James Dobson’s abusive teachings drove countless children away from their parents

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This week, the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family posted an otherwise innocuous message about what parents should do when their adult children no longer want to talk to them.

“Family estrangement,” the group explained, “can leave parents carrying grief, unanswered questions, and a deep longing for reconciliation.”

The advice was mostly predictable: Be humble. Listen “without becoming defensive.” Look for common ground. “Acknowledge where you’ve fallen short.” And, of course, pray a lot.

Family estrangement can leave parents carrying grief, unanswered questions, and a deep longing for reconciliation. While every situation is unique, healing often begins not with winning an argument, but with choosing the relationship.

Rebuilding trust may require humility, a willingness to listen without becoming defensive, and the courage and humility to acknowledge where you’ve fallen short. It can also mean accepting that your adult child is responsible for their own decisions while continuing to offer love, encouragement, and respect.

You don’t have to agree on everything to stay connected. Look for common ground, celebrate what is good, and affirm the person God created them to be. Even small steps toward understanding can create opportunities for restoration over time.

Most importantly, don’t stop praying. God sees what feels impossible and can work in ways we never expect. As you pursue peace, trust Him with both your heart and your relationship.

If you’ve experienced distance with an adult child, know that you are not alone.

If almost any other group had posted that, it might have been decent advice (minus the prayer bit). Estrangement is painful and rebuilding trust really does require humility, accountability, and a willingness to listen. It’s never pleasant when your kids want nothing to do with you, especially when, in your mind, all you’ve ever done is try to keep them on the right track.

Just one problem: This message came from Focus on the Family, a group that’s done more than most to destroy familial relationships. There’s no acknowledgment in that post that they’re the reason many kids raised with the help of their ministry no longer want a relationship with their parents.

Image of parent yelling at child (via Adobe Spark)

It’s wild to urge others to be humble when Focus refuses to display any institutional humility.

That became painfully obvious in the comments.

Before we get to that, though, it’s helpful to know why Focus on the Family is such a disaster for the families it claims to help.

Founder James Dobson wasn’t just a conservative who endorsed sex predator Donald Trump and alleged sex predator Roy Moore. For decades, he promoted an authoritarian model of parenting in which adults maintained control of their kids through fear and pain. In his 1970 book “Dare to Discipline,” and later, with books like “The Strong-Willed Child,” Dobson openly advocated beating children into submission.

He began the latter book with an anecdote about beating his family’s dog Siggie (short for Sigmund Freud) with a belt as an example of what you needed to do to your kids.

“The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works,” he wrote, before bragging about how “That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast.” Siggie weighed a mere 12 pounds. Dobson was 200.

He closed that section with the moral of the story: “Just as surely as a dog will occasionally challenge the authority of his leaders, a little child is inclined to do the same thing, only more so.” He later wrote, “When that nose-to-nose confrontation occurs between generations, it is extremely important for the adult to win decisively and confidently. The child has made it clear that he’s looking for a fight, and his parents would be wise not to disappoint him!”

If you assumed he would have learned better in the years to follow, that wasn’t the case at all. As recently as 2015, Dobson was still encouraging parents to inflict physical pain. If spanking didn’t work, he argued, it may be because you’re not doing it hard enough.

The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn’t hurt it isn’t worth avoiding next time. A slap with the hand on the bottom of a multi-diapered thirty-month old is not a deterrent to anything. While being careful not to go too far, you should ensure he feels the message.

That was his blueprint for domination. It taught a lot of parents that the best relationship with their kids was always one in which the parents won.

Dobson didn’t just offer shitty parenting advice. He was just as ignorant about sex, though he pretended to be an expert in that, too. He promoted Purity Culture before “Purity Culture” was a thing. Sex only came in one flavor: missionary style, with your wife, where the man orgasms and the woman is… there.

Everything else was downright satanic.

He also used his platform to denounce all things LGBTQ.

In 2015, while denouncing pastors who were allies to that community, he claimed that the B in that initialism stood for orgies: “I would like them to think, just for a moment, about ‘LGBT’… The ‘B’ stand for bisexual! That’s orgies! Are you really going to support this?”

While we’re at it, Dobson blamed the Sandy Hook massacre on atheism, abortion, and same-sex marriage. He blamed a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas on “The LGBTQ movement… closing in on the God-inspired and established institution of the family.” He signed the Nashville Statement, which was a declaration of faith-based bigotry signed by some of the most powerful Christians in the country. He equated Obamacare to living in Nazi Germany.

Dobson’s entire career was devoted to scaring Christians too dumb to realize that Dobson had no clue what he was talking about. His parenting advice was awful. His sex advice was awful. His political advice was awful. His idea of love involved hitting your kids, lying about gay people, and promoting violence against trans people.

As Kristin Kobes Du Mez wrote in Jesus and John Wayne, Dobson “corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.”

Dobson eventually stepped down from Focus on the Family, and later died, but the organization never meaningfully reckoned with the damage he caused. It may be less influential than it used to be, but it still reaches countless families with the same basic message: Conservative Christian parents are right, the outside world is dangerous, and children who reject those beliefs have gone astray.

That’s why this meme has never been more on point:

It’s also why the responses to that post included many comments from parents who still don’t understand why their kids have abandoned them.

Like this one, who condemned his son’s “(sinful) lifestyle choices” and refused to speak with the son’s “(woke) therapist.”

Another commenter chimed in to say she was in a similar situation, but she refused to “bend a knee to woke behavior.”

Another commenter insisted a “crazy woke therapist has damaged my adult child’s mind.”

In all those cases, it seems their children tried to explain their concerns to their parents—sometimes with professional help on their side—only to have the parents dismiss it all as ideological corruption. They wanted reconciliation but refused to do any work on their end to get there.

Then there was this mother who said her 38-year-old daughter wouldn’t talk to her because of all the “concussions” the daughter said she suffered, which led her to seek support groups and therapy. The mother blamed the daughter’s “personality disorder” and said she attended those support groups because “she likes the attention.”

So even when the abuse involved literal brain injuries, the parent still cast herself as the victim.

Another mother blatantly admitted she abandoned her son because he’s gay before arguing he was so disrespectful and that’s why he was now dead to her (“I have put him in God’s hands now”).

One commenter made the absurd claim that her 19-year-old child identified as a “transgender bug” and that a therapist “affirmed this.” There’s no reason to believe that happened, but instead of challenging her obvious anti-trans conspiracies, Focus on the Family replied with a link connecting her to one of their counselors.

In other words, this group did exactly what they told parents not to do: They validated defensiveness, avoided any kind of accountability, and reinforced the very bigotry that likely underlies the estrangement.

Other commenter understood the contradictions.

“The cognitive dissonance is absolutely incredible,” one person wrote. Another added, “Maybe Focus on the Family should shoulder some of the blame...nope, they put it back on the kids.”

One person directly called out parents who followed Dobson’s teachings: “If you raised your children according to the teachings of James Dobson, this is likely going to be the outcome for estrangement situations. His teachings were abusive plain and simple… You can’t sit around playing victim to a game you willingly played with your children.”

One person tried to talk sense into commenters (but received no takers in the replies): “This post disappointingly strengthens abusive parents and helps them to continue in their blindness, further extending the estrangement.”

Another wrote:

Until Christian organizations wake up and realize family estrangement is because the adult parents are stunted emotionally at a toddler age and counseling doesn’t even touch the root cause - there needs to be 2-4 year intensive program to grow the estranged parents up in a methodical way.

Can a toddler do therapy?

Why doesn’t someone wake up that therapy doesn’t work when a person has no self awareness.

(Even that person, though, suggested Focus on the Family could devote resources toward this problem, ignoring how Focus is sometimes the root cause of the problem.)

The bottom line is that a lot of these parents assumed their kids would grow up to become like-minded conservative Christians and were never prepared for the possibility that their kids might disagree with the core ideas their churches and ministries like Focus drilled into them.

This is the central problem with ministries like Focus on the Family in these situations. They frame estrangement as something that happens to parents rather than as a consequence they brought about by listening to Dobson. They refuse to admit estrangement is a boundary some kids established after years of rejection and abuse.

That’s before accounting for the physical abuse, sexual shame, and emotional trauma that groups like Focus normalized. Even in families without overt abuse, children learned that they were only ever going to be loved by their parents if they voted a certain way, married a certain kind of person, and led the life their parents chose for them.

Then those kids grew up and realized they didn’t need to play along with this version of conditional love. If that means not coming home for Thanksgiving or allowing their own children to interact with their grandparents, so be it.

That’s what happens to parents who care more about Focus on the Family than focusing on their families.

If Focus really wanted to help these parents, they would admit their mistakes and hire better experts in raising children to rewrite everything they’ve ever taught. It won’t solve the problems they caused but it could prevent future mistakes from happening again.

The children who walked away didn’t destroy these families. If anything, they were the first ones willing to break the cycle of abuse, and they should be commended for that.

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