James Dobson

===Medicine===
In 1967, he became an Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the [[University of Southern California School of Medicine]] for 14 years.<ref name="Hankins">Barry Hankins, ''American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement'', Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, USA, 2009, p. 156</ref> At USC he was exposed to troubled youth and the [[counterculture of the 1960s]]. He found it "a distressing time to be so young" because society offered him no moral absolutes he felt he could rely upon. [[Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War]] was blossoming into a widespread rejection of authority, which Dobson viewed as "a sudden disintegration of moral and ethical principles" among Americans his age and the younger people he saw in clinical practice. This convinced him that "the institution of the family was disintegrating."{{sfn|Gilgoff|2007|p=21–22}}

He spent 17 years on the staff of the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles in the Division of Child Development and Medical Genetics. For a time, Dobson worked as an assistant to [[Paul Popenoe]] at the Institute of Family Relations, a [[Relationship counseling|marriage-counseling]] center, in [[Los Angeles]].<ref>David Popenoe, ''War Over the Family'', Transaction Publishers, 2005. {{ISBN|978-0-7658-0259-0}}. Chapter 14: "Remembering My Father: An Intellectual Portrait of 'The Man Who Saved Marriages.'"</ref> Popenoe counseled couples on the importance of same-race marriage and adherence to gender norms for the purpose of [[eugenics]]. Under Popenoe, Dobson published about male-female differences and the dangers of feminism.<ref name=Farley2021 />