How Dr Spock gave parents a new way to bring up baby
AMERICAN paediatrician Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sparked a child-raising revolution after its publication 70 years ago tomorrow.
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A NERVOUS baby, wrote childcare expert Lena Sadler in 1906, “will sometimes cry so hard it will get black in the face and may have a convulsion; occasionally a small blood vessel may rupture ... usually on the face”.
Such infants should be disciplined by turning it over to “administer a sound spanking and it will instantly catch its breath. This will not have to be repeated many times until that difficulty will be largely under control”.
Little wonder American paediatrician Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sparked a child-raising revolution after its publication 70 years ago tomorrow.
From his opening sentences, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think,” Spock challenged the rigid discipline of his expert predecessors, including Australia’s preferred guru, New Zealander Frederic Truby King, founder of the Plunket Society child welfare network.
Truby King, like the US experts he echoed, was inspired by tragically high infant mortality rates. About one-seventh of babies born in New York died in their first year when Sadler “strongly protested against haphazard, promiscuous kissing of babies”.
“Many diseases, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, diphtheria, influenza, common colds, etc may be carried to the child” by kissing, she advised. “Kissing the hand is not much better ... for the hand quickly finds its way to the mouth.” Kisses should only go “on the back of the neck or on top of his head”.
Hygiene instructions flowed into rigid routines, with Truby King including a clock face dictating four-hourly feeds from 6am only until 10pm, along with bath, sleep and exercise times in his Feeding And Care Of Baby. Published in 1913 and influential in Australia until the 1950s, Truby King’s strict regimen also discouraged cuddling and undue attention to build character.
Then a father-of-two, Spock and his wife Jane Cheney spent three years writing the book first published in New York on July 14, 1946. It sold 500,000 copies in six months, rising to 50 million copies in 39 languages in 20 years.
“I urged parents not to be intimidated by the rule that existed in paediatrics — you must never feed off schedule, not a minute early, not a minute late,” he said. “I was one of the first paediatricians to say that’s nonsense. That rule made babies cry. It was even harder on mothers, they bit their nails in anguish waiting for the clock to say this is the minute you can feed.”
Born on May 2, 1903, in Connecticut, he was the first of lawyer Benjamin Spock and his wife Mildred’s six children. His mother’s discipline involved locking her children in a dark cupboard and leaving them until they learnt their lesson, forgetting about two daughters for a day during a trip to New York.
Spock studied literature and history at Yale, where he rowed with the US Men’s Eights that won gold at the 1924 Paris Olympics.
He then studied medicine at Yale and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons to graduate first in his class in 1929. After an internship in paediatrics and a psychiatry residency, he opened a private paediatric practice in New York in 1933, during the Great Depression when most parents could not afford a private paediatrician.
For several years Spock barely managed to cover his practice expenses. With his practice well established by 1938, Doubleday publishers asked him to write a childcare manual. He declined, saying he didn’t think he knew enough.
Pocket Books approached him in 1943, with plans to charge only 25 cents a copy. Spock accepted, and while on active duty with the Navy, he spent evenings dictating the book to his wife.
Most was drawn from concerns and worries shared by parents in his office. “I never looked at my records,” he said. “It all came out of my head.”
Spock wanted to combine paediatrics with child psychology, arguing the two should be tightly integrated, and to make parents more comfortable and effective, as most literature on child-rearing was “condescending, scolding or intimidating”. Instead of stressing self-denial and respect for authority, Spock encouraged parents to recognise children’s feelings and preferences.
After making an advertisement with Jacqueline Kennedy for John F Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960, Spock joined antinuclear, peace and anti-Vietnam War protests.
“It isn’t enough to bring up children happy and secure, you need to provide a decent world for them,” he said
Given a two-year jail sentence in 1968, which he never served, for aiding resistance to the draft, Spock also received death threats.
Critics blamed Spock’s liberal parenting advice for creating a self-indulgent “Spock generation”. Against charges that his methods caused a breakdown in discipline and collapse of conventional morality, Spock, who died in 1998, insisted he was “not a permissivist, and I never talked about instant gratification.”
Originally published as How Dr Spock gave parents a new way to bring up baby
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