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.