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Family ValuesDr. Phil's opportunistic parental-advice franchise.

By Ann Hulbert
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008, at 2:08 PM ET

Over the weekend, Dr. Phil entered the eye of the hurricane: the California hospital room containing an emotionally shattered Britney Spears, whose custody battles, domestic disputes, and other train-wreck antics have the nation transfixed.

The tough-love talk show host had planned to tape a show about fragile singer's problems.
He eventually decided against it, given Spears' distressed state. Dr. Phil was lambasted by many in the medical community for taking advantage of a struggling celebrity like Spears, who is known for her impulsive head-shaving and public displays of humiliation. In a 2004 article reprinted below, Ann Hulbert examined Dr. Phil's successful yet controversial "no-holds barred" therapy franchise.

"Let me tell you something, Mom," Dr. Phil lectured an "out-of-control" mother on a two-hour CBS special last week, taking his daytime doctor act to prime time. "You need to stop, and stop it right now." He was right; she was a family menace. But at least she knew it. You can't say the same about Dr. Phil in his new incarnation as the nation's "commando parenting" expert. There's a term for a guy who publicly humiliates not just parents but kids, bombarding viewers with a high-decibel spectacle of real-life family dysfunction—all in the service of flacking a new book, Family First, that promises domestic joy and peace. It's a term Dr. Phil uses a lot: abusive.

Inside last year's anti-obesity crusader—Dr. Phil's Ultimate Weight Solution soared to the top of the best-seller lists—it turns out there was a "reparenting" missionary dying to get out and indulge in some super-nannying. Entering his third solo TV season, Oprah's former sidekick was ready with a back-to-school bonanza: the CBS special heralding his new focus on the family (move over, Dr. Dobson). What more opportune moment than the launch of a book to burnish his child-rearing credentials and give viewers a mega-dose of the parenting turmoil he's now made the theme of his daily show? "Please help, Dr. Phil" is the regular plea of his frazzled guests. But when it comes to families, the truth is that Dr. Phil is an interloper who adds to the trouble.

Parenting success requires that you be consistent, according to the doctor—which is just what his book and his show aren't. Family First is supremely cool-headed. The guiding assumption of Dr. Phil's "step-by-step plan" to help parents become "system managers" at home is that families are just that: systems, in which everybody—from hubby on down to baby—has a role to play. In place of Spockian empathy, we have corporate efficiency for the dual-income-family whirlwind. The manual features seven parenting "tools," checklists to fill out, "audits" to conduct—and even a downloadable "behavioral contract" so parent and kid can spell out a disciplinary deal, in the hope that neither will get angry or whiny when a party fails to comply. Accountability along with consistency are the watchwords of the behaviorist approach. The Family First ad campaign touts the originality of the doctor's strategies, but don't be fooled. The book is yet another version of the managerial parenting approach that was born 40 years ago in Carl Rogers' communication techniques and has since blossomed into business guru Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997) and countless knockoffs. All paperwork and plans and no anecdotes, Family First is pallid (except for the revelation of Dr. Phil's new trauma credential: His father, heretofore hailed as his hero, was an alcoholic). Between covers, Dr. Phil loses not just his Texan twang, but his tang.

It's in front of the cameras that a notably more combative Dr. Tough Love comes to life. The premise (or the pretense) of Dr. Phil's show is that he's dealing with families in search of peace—families, he asserted at the start of the CBS special, that "may be a lot like yours." But then his cameras zoomed in for a tour of households from hell. One featured a rampaging mother whose husband struck back at her by not speaking to their son for a year. Another family was terrorized by a kid who displayed "nine of the 14 characteristics of a serial killer." Too many toys and too much television in your house? For his lurid prime-time show, Dr. Phil found a girl so showered with stuff by her mother that every room overflowed, and a boy whose mother let him sit in front of the television nine hours a day.

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