Creating a revolution in American child-rearing by encouraging practices that some condemned as “permissive” but he called “common sense”
Benjamin Spock
(1903–1998)
The title of the 1946 work that made Dr. Benjamin Spock famous hints at its disruptive impact: The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Just compare that to the child-rearing guides that had come before: Luther Emmett Holt’s 1894 The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Nurses and John B. Watson’s 1928 Psychological Care of Infant and Child. From Catechism and Psychological to Common Sense is a breakthrough journey. In contrast to previous child-rearing manuals, which assumed that parents knew nothing and were therefore in dire need of strict prescriptions, Spock began with two disarming sentences: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Within six months after the first copy rolled off the press, half a million had been sold. By the time of its author’s death in 1998, 50 million had been distributed worldwide in 39 languages.
Over the years, some—and not a few—have been appalled by the success of the man everyone knew as “Dr. Spock.” His advice—which boiled down to doing what comes naturally, to loving your child and showing that love whenever and wherever you can, to letting both parents and children be themselves—was condemned as launching and fostering an era of “permissive parenting.” When the first edition came out in 1946, everything from delinquency to anarchy was predicted. Others—a growing majority—came to see the era of Spock as liberation for both children and their parents.
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Benjamin Spock’s approach to child-rearing was not an arbitrary formulation. A physician, he began his pediatric practice in 1933 and quickly concluded that the prevailing approaches to pediatric care made the grave mistake of devoting little or no attention to the emotional needs of the child. Some widely accepted notions seemed downright cruel to Spock. As a young pediatrician, he saw that the medical profession gave him only two choices: either fall back on accepted practice, no matter how flawed, or challenge it. He chose the latter and mounted the challenge by investigating what was behind the questions parents continually asked him. They concerned such issues as toilet training and breastfeeding and infant and child sleep problems—basic stuff that should not have been controversial but was.
Spock’s first step was to seek training in psychoanalysis—and, in fact, he became the first American pediatrician to acquire a formal background in the discipline. He became an apostle of Freudian insights into the early causes of so many adult problems. Yet instead of merely coercing parents into acting in accordance with Freud’s theories, Spock worked to translate psychoanalytic insights into specific child-rearing recommendations and then to merely suggest that parents try them out and report back to him on the outcome. He continually sought feedback and refused to issue rigid, inflexible instructions. Instead, he counseled, recommending courses of action and monitoring the results they produced. He understood that he had something in common with the parents of his patients, namely dissatisfaction with prevailing methods of child-rearing. His solution was to work together with them to find better ways. The only constant he adhered to was encouraging parents to show their children affection.
Benjamin Spock was born on May 2, 1903, in New Haven, Connecticut. He was the first child in what grew into a large New England family. His father, a Yale graduate, was a lawyer for the New Haven Railroad, his mother, a homemaker. Both were descended from very early settlers in the area, and both were strict—“puritanical,” as Spock described them. He was sent to private preparatory schools and then to Yale, which he graduated from in 1925 with a major in English literature, a background that was good preparation for an author. A standout member of a standout Yale rowing crew, he sailed with the crew to Paris to represent the United States in the 1924 Olympic Games.
In 1925, Spock enrolled in medical school at Yale. But, partially in defiance of his father, he transferred in 1927 to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in New York City, graduating first in his class two years later. His wife, Jane Davenport Cheney, was a civil-liberties advocate and liberal political activist. Even before beginning his medical studies, he made the decision to specialize in the care and treatment of children, feeling that they had “their whole lives ahead of them.” He regarded pediatrics at the time as too narrowly focused on the physical aspects of child development, and so he supplemented it with his pediatric training in psychoanalysis.
From 1933 to 1944, Spock practiced pediatric medicine and taught pediatrics at Cornell Medical College. He also worked as a consultant in pediatric psychiatry for the New York City Department of Health. His reputation and influence within the profession grew rapidly, and as early as 1938 he had been approached by the publishing house Doubleday to write a manual on childcare. At that point in his career, he did not feel that he was sufficiently prepared to do so; but in 1943, while he was on a summer vacation, he began to write the book that would make him world famous. In 1944, with World War II raging, he joined the U.S. Navy as a medical officer, serving until 1947. In his spare time, he continued to write his book, which was published to spectacular success in 1946. The timing was perfect, since that was the first year of the postwar baby boom generation.
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The book, which was continually updated and revised between 1957 and 2012, outsold, in the United States, every book on every subject that had come before it, except for the works of William Shakespeare and the Holy Bible. (In 1976, cumulative sales of Baby and Child Care actually did surpass Shakespeare.)
As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, Spock’s once-revolutionary “common sense,” “flexible,” and “permissive” approach to child-rearing came to seem increasingly mainstream, going with the flow of a generation that cherished free expression. The young people of the 1960s were, in fact, a generation raised by parents that his book had influenced. At this juncture, looking around him at children who embodied values he himself had nurtured, Spock, influenced by his wife, became a political activist. To him, activism seemed a natural extension of his concern for children’s health. In 1962 he became cochairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), an organization dedicated to halting nuclear bomb testing in the earth’s atmosphere. Growing up in a radioactive environment, Spock reasoned, was not healthy and, therefore, was of urgent concern to a pediatrician. In 1963, he actively campaigned for Medicare, which was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” portfolio of social-welfare programs. His advocacy of what many fellow physicians condemned as “socialized medicine” brought an angry reaction from the American Medical Association, which condemned Spock as a lightweight popularizer rather than a dedicated academic researcher. Undaunted, Spock plunged even deeper into the era of protest, becoming a fierce antiwar activist in opposition to the escalating Vietnam conflict. Why labor, he asked, to preserve the health and well-being of children only to send them into an unjust, ill-advised, and ultimately fruitless war? Spock found himself marching and protesting alongside young people who had not even been born when he had embarked on his quietly revolutionary medical career.
While those who supported the war joined Spock’s medical critics in condemning his books on Baby and Child Care for having produced a spoiled generation of grungy hippies and drifting dropouts unwilling to fight for their country, Spock persisted in his protests—even as he pointed out that the antiwar movement had also spread among Third World youth, whose parents had never read his books.
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Yet some of what Benjamin Spock saw in the late 1960s disturbed him. When he revised his book in 1968, he added material advising parents not to be afraid to set limits to their children’s behavior, pointing out that “common sense” argued against limitless permissiveness. The advice was clearly out of step with his target audience, and, for the first time ever, Baby and Child Care showed a sharp—50 percent—decline in sales. Spock attributed this not to his advice about setting limits, but to the unpopularity of his antiwar activism. Indeed, on May 20, 1968, he was brought to trial, with other high-visibility protesters, on charges of conspiracy because he had actively counseled young men to resist the draft. Although he was convicted, the verdict was set aside on appeal over a procedural issue. The verdict and its reversal provoked some long-time users of Baby and Child Care to return their copies of the book in protest. More, however, found the prosecution of the aging baby doctor absurd.
In the 1970s, Spock published Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior and A Teenager’s Guide to Life and Love, both of which were more traditional in their approach to sexual behavior and general morality. After running for president on the People’s Party ticket in 1972, he returned to Baby and Child Care, revising the book in 1976 in response to feminist objections that he had perpetuated gender-role stereotypes of fathers and mothers. Conceding the validity of their objections, Spock revised what he himself considered “sexist” material and advocated a more equitable sharing of parental responsibility.
Spock’s health began to decline in the 1980s, and he withdrew from public life. He lived to ninety-four, dying on March 15, 1998. His books continue to enjoy substantial sales, and mainstream child-rearing, which had been highly prescriptive and restrictive before the advent of Spock, has never returned to the earlier rigid models that reflected a more absolutist view of society.