Month: May 2006

Benjamin Spock was born on this date in 1903. His handbook on child care, “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care,” sold nearly 50 million copies in 42 languages before his death in 1998. The following is from The New York Times obituary:

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who gently coached anxious postwar parents to trust their “own common sense,” only to be blamed by some critics for the self-indulgence of those parents’ children, the 60’s generation, died on Sunday at his home in San Diego. He was 94.
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Dr. Spock also became well known as an antiwar demonstrator in the 1960’s, as he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and against the war in Vietnam and was arrested in protest demonstrations. ”There’s no point in raising children if they’re going to be burned alive,” was how he made the connection between parents, pediatricians and politics.

Dr. Spock had already broken with authority in his child-rearing handbook, which he saw as giving ”practical application” to the ideas propounded by two early 20th-century sages, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator.

“John Dewey and Freud said that kids don’t have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will,” he observed in 1972.

And so in the opening chapter of the book, first published in hardcover in 1946 with the title “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,” Dr. Spock counseled his readers not to “take too seriously all that the neighbors say.”

“Don’t be afraid to trust your own common sense,” he wrote. “What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best.”

Such relaxed advice, given in the easy, practical, reassuring way that he had with parents, was light-years from the stern dictums of earlier standard works, like the 1928 book “Psychological Care of Infant and Child” by Dr. John B. Watson. “Never, never kiss your child,” Dr. Watson commanded. “Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.”