Benjamin Spock

From Philosopedia

Spock, Benjamin McLane (2 May 1903 - 15 March 1998)

“You know more than you think you do,” pediatrician and author Spock wrote in The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). The work is said to have sold more copies that any other original title ever published in the United States. "Don’t be afraid to trust your common sense,” he wrote. “What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best.”

Such a view differed radically from that found in the 1928 book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, by Dr. John B. Watson. “Never, never kiss your child,” Watson had warned. “Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.” His break with authority, Dr. Spock said in 1972, gave “practical application” to the ideas of Sigmund Freud and John Dewey. “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.” In 1968 he was named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In The Humanist January-February 1968 issue, he was quoted:

The nation that brings up its children with the idea that all they have to be concerned about is their future well-being and their own success in life is headed for trouble. We must bring up our children with a strong sense of service to their community, to their country, and to their world. This education has to start way back in the family.

That same year he was tried and convicted for having counseled draft evasion during the United States involvement in Vietnam. On appeal, the conviction was overturned. In 1972, he was the pacifist People’s Party presidential candidate.

Dr. Spock has been termed “the American physician everyone knows.” According to biographer Thomas Maier, Spock was a product of too little love from his parents, flirted wildly with his female patients, gave little consideration to his first wife’s dependence on the antidepressant Miltown, and seldom touched, hugged, or kissed his own sons. Dr. Spock’s entry in Who’s Who:

In pediatric practice I was trying, with difficulty, to reconcile concepts gained in psychoanalytic training with what mothers told me about their children. After ten years of that I was able to write Baby and Child Care, which, in turn, brought invitations to research and teaching jobs. To save children from radiation I became a public supporter of a test ban treaty and co-chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1962 which led, eventually to full-time opposition to the Vietnam war, conviction for conspiracy, conversion to socialism.

{CE; E; HNS2; Eric Pace, The New York Times, 17 March 1998}