1903-1998
Benjamin Spock was, for a generation, the canonical authority in America on the raising of children. Even after Spock passed the apogee of his influence, he continued to be the point of reference for almost all writers on the subject for the next forty years and into the early twenty-first century. By almost any standard Spock was the most important American author of child-rearing advice of the twentieth century. His principal work, Baby and Child Care, went through seven editions, was translated into thirty-eight languages, and sold more than fifty million copies around the world. Aside from the Bible, it was the best-selling book of the twentieth century in America.
THE EARLY YEARS
Spock was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of a successful corporate lawyer. He graduated from Yale University, won a gold medal as an oarsman at the 1924 Olympics, and went to medical school at Columbia University. In the 1930s Spock studied at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He was the first psychoanalytically trained pediatrician in New York, where he maintained a private practice from 1933 to 1943.
In 1946 he did. The first edition of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care began, as did all subsequent editions: "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." It invited mothers to indulge their own impulses and their children’s, assuring them on the basis of the latest scientific studies that it was safe to do so.
Earlier advice, embodied in the convergence of the psychologist John Watson’s Psychological Care of Infant and Child and the U.S. government’s Infant Care pamphlets of the 1920s and 1930s, warned against parental deviation from rigid disciplinary schedules and undue display of fondness or physical affection. Spock urged spontaneity, warmth, and a fair measure of fun for parents and children alike. He insisted that there were no infallible rules and that each child had to be treated as a distinct individual.
A CHILD-CENTERED APPROACH
Baby and Child Care seemed predicated on an unprecedented child-centeredness that celebrated instinct in youngsters and their mothers as well. After decades during which parents had been told they would spoil the child disastrously if they yielded to the child’s demands, Spock told parents they could trust the child’s desires and their own. "What you instinctively feel like doing is best," he promised his readers, in deliberate defiance of Watson. If you "feel like comforting the child, do it." The very feeling would make it "natural and right."
Spock found parables of the reliability of desire in what was at the time the most current research on sleeping and eating. Those studies showed that infants stabilized a bedtime schedule on their own, without parental coercion, if given a little time. The studies demonstrated that somewhat older children worked out a feeding routine on their own, if they were indulged while they came to it. Older children even chose a balanced diet once past the first rush to sweets. Afforded free run of a smorgasbord, children pigged out for a few days on candy, cake, and ice cream but then of their own volition turned to proteins, greens, and grains. It turned out that, as Spock put it, the child "knows a lot." Parents could give in to their child "without worrying about the consequences," hard though it might be for them "to have this kind of confidence in [the child's] appetites." Modern mothers and fathers were "lucky" to be able to let go and be "natural."
Impulse—of both the child and the parents—could be safely followed. Spontaneous inclination was a virtue, deliberate control a vice. A mother angry at her child would do better to express her anger at once. Waiting until she calmed down and came to conscious mastery would be "grim" and "unnatural."
Conservative critics later complained that Spock promoted what they called permissive child rearing. In one of the earliest expressions of the "culture wars" that marked the last quarter of the twentieth century, critics held Spock responsible for the counterculture and the collapse of conventional morality. On their face, such charges were difficult to sustain. Spock never counseled permissiveness and soon enough advised against it. He simply had no stake in permissiveness per se. When critics of the 1946 edition assailed what they took to be Spock’s undue indulgence of the child, Spock rewrote the permissive passages without a pang in the second edition. As Spock said in that revised version and in every revision that came after, the issue was not intrinsically important. Both strictness and permissiveness would work for "goodhearted" parents, neither for "insecure" ones. The only matter of any real moment was "the spirit that the parent [put] into managing the child."
Discipline and indulgence were not, for Spock, at odds. He trained as a psychoanalyst, but he never permitted Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) tragic vision to inflect his advice. Civilization, in Spock’s view, did not entail discontents. Conflict was not in the nature of things. Antagonism only appeared when parents mismanaged.
Spock’s essential endeavor was to keep parents from activating the infantile ego. His deepest concern was to prevent pitched battles of will between mother and child. He resorted to permissiveness only as a tactic—one among several—in a larger strategy of conflict management. It was never a principle, only a ploy, driven by fear of the fallout of contention.
AN ACTIVIST LIFE
But if Spock did not espouse opposition in his pediatrics, he embraced it in his politics. Even before the war in Vietnam, he warned against the dangers of nuclear testing and served as cochairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He was a vocal opponent of the war, helped lead the march on the Pentagon in 1967, and was convicted and sentenced to jail for conspiracy to aid draft resisters in 1968. (His conviction was reversed on appeal.) He ran for president in 1972 as the candidate of the People’s Party and continued as an activist long after. Past the age of seventy, Spock was arrested for protesting against a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, budget cuts at the White House, and nuclear weapons at the Pentagon. Past eighty, Spock still gave as many as a hundred talks a year on the nuclear arms race.
Spock’s child-rearing advice changed as his political views and American family life evolved. In successive editions of Baby and Child Care, he made a place for fathers as well as mothers in child care, allowed new gender roles for boys and girls, acknowledged divorce and single parenting, and explicitly urged vegetarianism on his readers.
But in essentials Spock’s advice never changed. He always aimed to write a guide for living more than a medical reference book. He always challenged conventional notions of normality and sought to alleviate anxiety, in parents and children alike. He always offered reassurance in the down-to-earth manner in which he set forth his advice. He had a genius for popularization. No one ever explained Freud better in everyday language. No one ever wrote better gender-neutral prose.
Even as Spock set himself in militant antagonism to the status quo in politics, he endeavored to help parents accommodate their children to fit in the society and the economy the children would encounter. However inadvertently, he pushed mothers and fathers to prepare children for the corporate bureaucracies in which they would make their careers. He emphasized the cooperativeness and congeniality that organizational life demands. He held that parents "owe it to the child to make him likeable" and that they had to make the child be like others to be likable. He never did reconcile his dissident politics and his conformist child rearing.
