Baby and Child Care

Baby and Child Care, the most widely read and influential child‐rearing manual of the second half of the twentieth century.Written during World War II by the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, with the assistance of his first wife, Jane Cheney Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by the mid‐1990s had more than 46 million copies in six editions (1946, 1957, 1968, 1977, 1985, 1992). The book's success owed much to Spock's readable prose; his precise and accessible advice; and his effort, not always successful, to convince anxious parents that good child rearing was a matter of “common sense.”

Despite its popularity, Baby and Child Care proved controversial after 1968, when the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale and others charged Spock (then a leader of the anti–Vietnam War peace movement) and his “permissive” approach to child rearing with having produced a generation of spoiled, radical youths. In the 1970s, Gloria Steinem led feminists in casting the Freudian Spock as an oppressor of women. With good reason, Spock disputed the charge of permissiveness, insisting that Baby and Child Care championed a flexible approach encompassing either “moderate strictness” or “moderate permissiveness.” Spock met some of the feminist objections in 1977 and later editions by adopting nonsexist language, advocating an expanded parenting role for fathers, and acknowledging the existence of two‐career families and their need for day care.

Scholars generally rejected the view that Baby and Child Care was responsible for the upheavals of the 1960s. The historian William Graebner presented Spock as a social engineer whose “democratic” approach to child rearing, based on Progressive Era educational theory, reflected interwar anxieties about aggression and totalitarianism. While Michael Zuckerman argued that Spock's advocacy of a confident parent presiding over frictionless parent‐child relationships prepared children to be cooperative and amicable adults in a postwar corporate order, Nancy Pottishman Weiss contended that Spock's advocacy of unfailing maternal confidence was burdensome and counterproductive for many women readers.
See also Family; Feminism; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Michael Zuckerman , Dr. Spock: The Confidence Man, in The Family in History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg, 1975, pp. 179–207.
Nancy Pottishman Weiss , Mother, the Invention of Necessity: Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care, American Quarterly 29 (Winter 1977): 519–46.
William Graebner , The Unstable World of Benjamin Spock: Social Engineering in a Democratic Culture, 1917–1950, Journal of American History 67 (Dec. 1980): 612–29.

William Graebner