Benjamin Spock, World's Pediatrician, Dies at 94 Benjamin Spock, World's Pediatrician, Dies at 94 By ERIC PACE 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. Over half a century, Dr. Spock's homey handbook on child care, now titled ''Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care,'' became one of the best sellers of all time. Therese Zazycki, a spokeswoman for Pocket Books, its main publisher, said yesterday that almost 50 million copies have been sold around the world, translated into 42 languages. 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.'' Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of the Harvard Medical School, another noted pediatrician-author, once said of Dr. Spock: ''Before he came along, advice to parents was very didactic. He opened the whole area of empowered parenting. He gave parents choices and encouraged them to think things out for themselves.'' Dr. Spock repeatedly revised his own book over the years, and, for the fifth and sixth editions, which appeared in 1985 and 1992 respectively, he had a co-author: Dr. Michael B. Rothenberg, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Washington's medical school. Dr. Spock said in an interview in early 1992, when he was 88, that he planned to stay involved in updating the book ''as long as I live.'' Ms. Zazycki of Pocket Books said that, as scheduled, the seventh edition of the book will be published, in mass market paperback and trade paperback versions, on May 2, which would have been the doctor's 95th birthday.

Tracey Guest, a spokeswoman for the publishing house Dutton, said yesterday that Dutton will publish a hard-cover version of the seventh edition of Dr. Spock's book on July 1. That new edition is by Dr. Spock and a new co-author, Dr. Steven J. Parker, who is a Boston pediatrician. He was the lead author of a study, published in 1992 in the journal Pediatrics, which found that women with one aspect of the Type A personality -- loosely identified as a hard-driving nature -- tend to have babies who exhibit Type A temperaments. Dr. Spock's literary agent, Robert Lescher, said late in 1997 that Dr. Spock was ''very deeply involved'' in preparing the seventh edition. Altogether, the doctor was the author or a co-author of 13 books. He was also a prolific author of magazine columns for more than 30 years. He wrote columns about raising children for Redbook and Ladies Home Journal and, more recently, for Parenting magazine. From Pediatrics To Politics In the 1960's and 1970's, Dr.

Spock's views on child-rearing were sometimes blamed for the disorderliness of young people, many of whose parents had been devotees of his book. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew blamed the doctor for what Mr. Agnew called the undue permissiveness abroad in the land. It was in the 1960's that Dr. Spock became an antiwar activist and opponent of the draft, nuclear armaments and the United States's involvement in Vietnam. He was a co-chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, known as SANE, from 1962 to 1967. He also underwent what he called a ''conversion to socialism.'' The doctor was arrested at various protest demonstrations. In 1968 a Boston court convicted him of conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft. He was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $5,000, but the conviction was reversed in 1969 by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on the ground of insufficient evidence. In 1972 Dr. Spock was the Presidential candidate of the People's Party, a coalition of left-wing organizations.

His platform called for free medical care, the legalization of abortion and marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income for families and the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from foreign countries. In 1976 he was the party's candidate for Vice President, and in the late 1970's he was also prominent in anti-nuclear demonstrations. By the time he turned 80, in 1985, he had been arrested a dozen times for civil disobedience, but he did not stop. In 1987, he and others were arrested and charged with trespassing after demonstrating at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station against the test launching of a Trident 2 missile. The Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the author of ''The Power of Positive Thinking'' and a critic of Dr. Spock, saw it differently. He said the doctor had gone ''out in the streets with these babies raised according to his books, demonstrating with them for things they claim we should not deny them.'' Dr. Peale said the doctor's views amounted to: ''Feed 'em whenever they want, never let them cry, satisfy their every desire.'' Spock Interprets Spock on Babies Dr. Spock said that Dr.

Peale, Mr. Agnew and other critics had distorted what he had written. ''I didn't want to encourage permissiveness, but rather to relax rigidity,'' he once observed. ''Every once in a while, somebody would say to me, 'There's a perfectly horrible child down the block whose mother tells everybody that he's being brought up entirely by your book.' But my own children were raised strictly, to be polite and considerate. I guess people read into the book what they wanted to.'' On another occasion, striking a different note, he said: ''Maybe my book helped a generation not to be intimidated by adulthood. When I was young, I was always made to assume that I was wrong. Now young people think they might be right and stand up to authority.'' The doctor's own political activism deterred some people from buying his book. In an interview in 1992, he reported: ''The sale of the book was depressed a great deal during the Vietnam period. It has gradually crept back up.'' And Dr. Edward F.

Zigler, a child psychologist on the Yale University faculty, said in the same year that there were still ''people today who mistrust his book because of his position on social issues.'' Dr. Spock also came in for criticism from the women's movement. He was denounced for what were called sexist passages in his writing, one of which objected to women ''acting more and more like men.'' Gloria Steinem once told him that she hoped he understood that he was considered a symbol of repression, like Freud and other male supremacists. In 1971, noting the feminist criticism, he wrote: ''I agree today that a man has no business trying to tell women what their characteristics are, which ones are inborn, which are more admirable, which will be best utilized by what occupations.'' In talking about himself, Dr. Spock understandably referred now and then to his own starchy upbringing in New Haven. Once, in the 1960's, he said that in his life he had ''tried hard to rebel, to be pleasure-seeking,'' but that his political dissent had been based on stern moral considerations that his Yankee parents would have approved of.

From Need to Help, An Urge to Doctor Benjamin McLane Spock was born May 2, 1903 in New Haven. He was the eldest of the six children -- four girls and two boys -- of Benjamin Ives Spock, a railroad lawyer who was conservative in his politics, and Mildred Louise Stoughton Spock. The Spocks were descended from early Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley; the family name was originally Spaak. After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., Dr. Spock entered Yale College, where he majored in English, minored in history and, as he recalled years later, ''gravitated toward medical school without any real decision.'' Six feet 4 inches tall and broad-shouldered, he was, literally and figuratively, a big man on campus, a member of the Yale crew that won in the Paris Olympics in 1924. ''I had an awfully good time at college,'' he recalled years later. He also worked summers in a home for crippled children. ''I guess that's why I became a baby doctor, thinking of those kids,'' he said later. ''My doctoring was always vaguely humanitarian.'' After earning a B.A.

in 1925, he studied at the Yale Medical School from 1925 to 1927, and then transferred to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and earned his M.D. in 1929, after being at the head of his class at the end of the last two years. He interned at Presbyterian Hospital in New York and was a resident in pediatrics at the New York Nursery and Child's Hospital. ''Sometime during the pediatric residency years (1931-1932)'' Dr. Spock wrote years later, ''I conceived the idea that someone going into pediatrics should have psychological training.'' And so he also spent 10 months as a resident in psychiatry at New York Hospital, and he went on to part-time training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from 1933 to 1938. A Warm Charmer With Children In 1933 he also opened his pediatric practice and after a couple of lean years it began to flourish. His success was partly the result of his charm, warmth and vitality. ''All the young mothers had a great crush on him,'' a former patient said years later.

''He was a gay and charming man.'' Another reason he did well was that, as the product of a large and happy family, he took great pleasure in being with his little patients. He once said, ''One of my faults as a pediatrician has always been that I whoop it up too much with children.'' His success was also the result in part of his concern for the feelings of his patients and their parents. He wore ordinary business suits, rather than white doctor's coats, to make his visitors feel more relaxed. Describing Dr. Spock's child-side manner, another writer on child care, Dr. Milton Levine, recalled later, ''I used to hear parents and even doctors talk about him as 'the man with the gentle face and eyes.' '' In addition to his private practice, Dr. Spock served, early in his career, as an instructor in pediatrics at Cornell Medical College, an assistant attending pediatrician at New York Hospital and a consultant to the New York City Health Department. He also was the part-time school doctor at the Brearley School on East 83d Street, a private school for girls from kindergarten through the 12th grade. At the school, Lynn Z.

Bloom wrote in her 1972 book, ''Dr. Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical'': ''He realized that the perceptive teachers could see each child in the context of the whole class and so understand her in a way the pediatrician never could. The perspective he gained at Brearley was to be drawn upon at length in his later writings for parents.'' In 1943, ten years after the birth of his first son, Michael, Dr. Spock began three years of writing ''The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.'' He spent countless evenings dictating it to his first wife, the former Jane Davenport Cheney, who typed it up as he went along and assisted in many other ways. Dictating the book helped to give it the conversational tone that was one of its great attractions. Dr. Spock joined the Navy in 1944 and kept on writing in his spare time while working as a psychiatrist in military hospitals in New York and California. He left the Navy, with the rank of lieutenant commander, in 1946. The doctor took enormous pains with the book and even worked on its original index during a slow troop-train journey from New York to California.

To make things as convenient as possible for readers, he made sure the index included such common-sensical entries as ''Bedtime -- keeping it happy.'' In the 1972 interview, Dr. Spock said he had undertaken the book ''as a departure from conventional wisdom.'' ''It wasn't radical, though it struck out in new directions,'' he said. A New Perspective On Raising Children Taking a longer look backward, in the 1992 interview, the doctor ascribed much of his professional success to his own psychoanalytic training in the 1930's. In that period, he said, it was highly unusual for an American pediatrician to have that kind of training. ''For the first 10 years I was in practice, before I wrote the book,'' he said, ''I was trying desperately to reconcile Freudian concepts with what mothers told me about their babies.'' In the book, Dr. Spock wrote that it was unnecessary for a mother to stick to a rigid feeding schedule for her baby and that it hurt a mother emotionally to have to wait for a fixed feeding time while her baby wailed. But he also stipulated: ''This is not an argument against reasonable regularity.

I do not think it is harmful for a baby or a mother to work toward a schedule. The mother has to run the rest of her household and when the baby is ready to fit in, it will help everybody.'' On the question of how to cope with crying, Dr. Spock took a balanced view: ''I don't think it's good to let a baby cry miserably for long periods if there's a way to comfort him, not because it will do him any physical harm but because of what it might do to his and his mother's spirits. ''The child, he wrote, ''needs to feel that his mother and father, however agreeable, still have their own rights, know how to be firm, won't let him be unreasonable or rude.'' And he added, ''The spoiled child is not a happy creature even in his own home.'' From Book's Success, A Frightened Author In retrospect, it seemed almost inevitable that the book would become an enormous success, appearing as it did when the post-World War II baby boom was under way, and the winds of change were stirring in the baby and child care field. Even Dr.

Spock's flinty Yankee mother is said to have observed, after reading the book, ''Why Benny, it's really quite sensible.'' But the doctor said in the 1992 interview that he was frightened when 750,000 copies were sold in its first year. ''I was scared that the book would be misunderstood,'' he said, ''that somebody, thinking she was following my advice, would do something that would make a child worse, or even kill a child.'' In its first six years the book sold more than four million copies, and the languages it was eventually translated into included Urdu, Thai and Tamil. Duell, Sloan & Pearce published the original hard-cover edition. Pocket Books, which had persuaded Dr. Spock to write the book, brought it out in paperback with the title, ''The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care,'' which later became simply ''Baby and Child Care'' and then ''Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care.'' That is the title of the hard-cover and paperback versions of the current, sixth edition, which came out in 1992. Dr. Spock's earnings from the book were widely thought to have made him a millionaire.

In the early 1990's, they were about $150,000 a year. As time passed, he watched for new developments and insights that might require him to revise parts of his book. He recalled years later that when he returned briefly to his private pediatric practice in New York after the war, ''I began to see examples of a going-to-bed sleep problem in infants that I had never seen before: a baby would object to being put to bed in the evening, and his mother would keep picking him up. ''If she was a type who could be progressively intimidated, her baby could turn into a tyrant in six months. He could not only learn to stay awake until 10 or 11 o'clock at night but demand that his exhausted mother carry him around in her arms.'' Dr. Spock took that problem into account in 1954, when he began to prepare revisions. As he put it later, ''I wrote that more mothers got into difficulty from being afraid to give firm leadership than from being too rigid.

And I put more emphasis on the rights of parents, on the need for firm parental leadership, and on my conviction that firmness makes for not only better-behaved children but for happier ones.'' Changing of Guard In Child Authorities After giving up his New York practice in 1947, Dr. Spock was affiliated with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and went on to serve as professor of child development at the University of Pittsburgh from 1951 to 1955 and at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland from 1955 to 1967, when he retired from teaching.

Over the next years, he kept active ''writing articles and books, keeping up with correspondence, going out on frequent speaking tours,'' he wrote in a 1989 volume of memoirs, ''Spock on Spock.'' He continued to make changes in his baby and child care book, and the fourth edition in 1976 was revised largely, as he said in a preface, ''to eliminate the sexist biases of the sort that help to create and perpetuate discrimination against girls and women.'' One change was to refer to the baby and child as ''she'' as well as ''he.'' Another was in descriptions of the parents' roles. ''I always assumed that the parent taking the greater share of young children (and of the home) would be the mother, whether or not she wanted an outside career,'' he said in the preface. ''Yet it's this almost universal assumption that leads to women feeling a much greater compulsion than men to sacrifice a part of their careers in order that the children will be well cared for,'' he went on. ''Now I recognize that the father's responsibility is as great as the mother's.'' By early 1990, when Dr.

Spock was 86, the 71-year-old Dr. Brazelton, who tirelessly addressed parents' groups, had become the country's most visible contemporary authority on raising babies and young children. And Dr. Penelope Leach, a British psychologist-author, had also joined the top echelon of experts to whom new parents were turning for advice. But Dr. Spock remained one of the most widely read authorities on child-rearing. In 1976, the year that the fourth edition of his baby and child care book came out, he was divorced from his first wife, Jane, whom he married in 1927. In an interview shortly before the divorce, she noted that he had dedicated the latest revision of the book to her and that he had acknowledged that she had given him much help in writing it.

''Feminist groups landed on him like a ton of bricks because they thought his book was sexist,'' Jane Spock said, ''So in the process of taking sexism out of his book, he did this dedication to me." She said she should have been considered the co-author of the book, and then, as she put it, ''I would have been asked on television shows, too, and I would have been asked what I thought about things. I might have been more of a somebody. But I don't think he could stand it, sharing the spotlight. You know how people are.'' Later in 1976, Dr. Spock was married to Mary Morgan, whom he met through her work arranging conferences for professionals. ''Spock on Spock,'' subtitled ''a Memoir of Growing Up With the Century,'' was written in collaboration with her. In an interview in 1994, soon after Dr. Spock's 91st birthday, Ms. Morgan said his good health and longevity stemmed from his life style, which still included rowing.

In those days he began each day with an hour's meditation, 30 minutes of yoga, a shiatsu massage, a hot sesame oil massage and a macrobiotic breakfast of brown rice, miso soup and vegetables. Nonetheless, he said at the time, ''It surprised me very much to find I got to be 91.'' In an interview last month, Ms. Morgan said that she and her husband lived on a budget of roughly $100,000 a year, but that their savings had been depleted by 24-hour nursing and by other kinds of care for the doctor, who came down with pneumonia six times last year and had been in declining health. She had decided to appeal for assistance from friends by means of a letter-writing campaign and through fund-raising parties at the time of the publication of the next edition of the baby and child care book. Dr. Spock had two sons from his first marriage, and they did not comment about her appeal. But Ms. Morgan said the family was divided over whether the doctor should enter a nursing home, which would cost less.

His home care in January, 1998 cost over $16,000 -- which was largely not covered by Medicare and private insurance. ''They wanted to put him in a nursing home and I wouldn't do it,'' she said, ''And I said I will stay beside him till the day I die.'' She said their income had dwindled by half because the baby and child care book's sales had fallen off since people were waiting for the next edition. Last month, Gina Centrello, the president of Pocket Books, said they had decided to help pay his medical bills. In addition to his wife, Ms. Morgan, Dr. Spock is survived by two sons, Michael of Illinois and John of California; a stepdaughter, Ginger Davison of Tennessee; four grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; and two sisters, Sally Jordy of Rhode Island and Marjorie Spock of Maine. In 1994 Dr. Spock expressed some very mixed views about child-rearing in his book ''A Better World for Our Children: Rebuilding American Family Values.'' ''When I look at our society and think of the millions of children exposed every day to its harmful effects, I am near despair,'' he wrote.

He bemoaned ''the progressive loss of values in this century'' and ''the fact that our present society is simply not working.'' But he added a hopeful note. ''Of course we cannot return to the 'good old days,' '' he said, ''But we can bring back some of those traditional family values and stability. Our greatest hope is to bring up children inspired by their opportunities for being helpful and loving.'' Books Written By Dr. Spock Baby and Child Care 1946 A Baby's First Year 1954 Feeding Your Baby and Child 1955 Dr. Spock Talks With Mothers 1961 Problems of Parents 1962 Caring for Your Disabled Child 1965 Dr. Spock on Vietnam 1968 Decent and Indecent 1970 A Teenager's Guide to Life and Love 1970 Raising Children in a Difficult Time 1974 Spock on Parenting 1988 Spock on Spock: a Memoir of Growing Up With the Century 1989 A Better World for our Children 1994 Those currently in print are: Dr.

Spock on Parenting (Pocket Books, 1988) Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, sixth edition (Dutton, hardcover edition; Pocket Books, mass market and trade paperback editions, 1992) A Better World for Our Children (National Press Books, hardcover edition; Contemporary Books, trade paperback edition, 1994) Benjamin Spock Biography - life, family, children, parents, death, wife, school, young Benjamin Spock Biography La Jolla, California American pediatrician and political activist Benjamin Spock, pediatrician (doctor who treats children) and political activist, was most noted for his book Baby and Child Care, which significantly changed widely held attitudes toward the raising of infants and children. Youth and education Benjamin McLane Spock was born on May 2, 1903, in New Haven, Connecticut, the oldest child in a large, strict New England family.

His family was so strict that in his eighty-second year he would still be saying, "I love to dance in order to liberate myself from my puritanical [strict and conservative] upbringing." He was educated at private preparatory schools when he was young and attended Yale from 1921 to 1925, majoring in English literature. He was also a member of the rowing crew that represented the United States in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, France. Spock began medical school at Yale in 1925 but transferred to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1927. By this time he had married Jane Davenport Cheney. Spock had decided well before starting his medical studies that he would "work with children, who have their whole lives ahead of them." He believed that pediatricians of the time were focusing too much on the physical side of child development, so he learned psychiatry (medicine focusing on the mind) as well. Baby and Child Care Between 1933 and 1944 Spock practiced pediatric (specializing in children) medicine.

At the same time he taught pediatrics at Cornell Medical College and consulted (advised) in pediatric psychiatry for the New York City Health Department. On a summer vacation in 1943 he began to write his most famous book, Baby and Child Care. He continued to work on it from 1944 to 1946 while serving as a medical officer in the navy. Benjamin Spock. Library of Congress . Many early baby-care books said to feed infants on a strict schedule and not to pick them up when they cried. Spock's book broke with the strict tone and rigorous instructions found in earlier generations of baby-care books. Spock told his readers, "You know more than you think you do.… Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense.… Take it easy, trust your own instincts, and follow the directions that your doctor gives you." The response was overwhelming. At that time Baby and Child Care became America's all-time best-seller except for William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) works and the Bible. By 1976 it had also passed Shakespeare.

After Spock's discharge from the navy, he became associated with the famous Mayo Clinic (1947–1951). He then became a professor of child development at the University of Pittsburgh (1951–1955) and at Case Western Reserve (1955–1967). Becomes politically active Spock's political activism began during this period, growing logically out of his concern for children. A healthy environment for growing children, he believed, included a radiation-free atmosphere to breathe. In 1962 he became cochairman of SANE, an organization dedicated to stopping nuclear bomb tests in the Earth's atmosphere. The following year Spock campaigned for Medicare, a government program to help older citizens. He angered the American Medical Association, many of whose members were already suspicious of a colleague who wrote advice columns for the Ladies Home Journal and Redbook instead of writing technical articles for the medical journals. Spock was an early opponent of the Vietnam War (1955–75; a conflict fought in Vietnam when Communist North Vietnam invaded democratic South Vietnam). As the war escalated (grew), so did antiwar protest, in which Spock participated energetically.

He marched and demonstrated with young people who had not yet been born when he had begun his medical career. Spock's political opponents accused him of teaching "permissiveness" in Baby and Child Care. They claimed an entire generation of American youth had been raised and ruined. Without success Spock pointed out that similar student protests were happening in Third World countries, where his book was not sold, and were not happening in Western European countries, where it sold well. Baby and Child Care revised Because of Spock's own strict personal upbringing and his acute moral sense, he may have intended a lot less than some of them realized when he told parents to "relax." In 1968 he revised Baby and Child Care to make his intentions more clear, now cautioning his readers "Don't be afraid that your children will dislike you" when they set limits and enforced them. Nevertheless, the 1968 edition showed a fifty percent drop in sales. Spock thought it was because of his stand on the war in Vietnam. On May 20, 1968, Spock was put on trial for conspiracy, along with several other leading war protesters. The charge was that he had counseled young people to resist the draft.

He was convicted, but on appeal the verdict was set aside (cancelled) on a technicality (small detail). Some upset readers turned in their well-thumbed copies of Baby and Child Care in order to prevent further undermining of their children's patriotism. To many other readers, however, the government's indictment (charging with an offense) of the baby doctor seemed rather like prosecuting Santa Claus. Modifies and explains his views Two books published in 1970, Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior and A Teenager's Guide to Life and Love, made it clear that Spock was a good deal more of a traditional moralist than either his friends or enemies realized. He had been driven into the antiwar and other reform movements by the same old-fashioned conscience that propelled some of his opponents in exactly the opposite direction. At the same time the doctor showed himself capable of growing and changing. In 1972 he ran for president on the People's Party (an independent political party) ticket. Spock was also capable of admitting a mistake.

Badgered for some five years on the lecture platform by feminists objecting to the gender-role stereotypes of fathers and mothers as they appeared in Baby and Child Care, he eventually admitted that much of what they had said had been right. In 1976, thirty years after its initial publication, Spock brought out a third version of the famous book. He deleted material he himself termed "sexist" and called on fathers to share more of the parental responsibility. Last years Formally retired in 1967, Spock was the kind of person who never really retired in spirit. Contemplating his own death as his health began to fail in the 1980s, he wrote in 1985 (at the age of eighty-two) that he did not want any dark funeral tunes played over him: "My ideal would be the New Orleans black funeral, in which friends snake-dance through the streets to the music of a jazz band." Spock had chronic bronchitis and suffered a stroke in 1989. His second wife, Mary, worked with him on his autobiography, Spock on Spock, which was published in 1989. Dr.

Spock died at his home in La Jolla, California, on March 15, 1998, at the age of ninety-four. Spock's work influenced how Americans brought up an entire generation of young people. Even today his books are still regarded as a popular source of information for bringing up children. For More Information Dr. Spock: Thomas Maier: 9780465043156: Amazon.com: Books Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review Thomas Maier's solidly researched, candid yet compassionate biography of the man who revolutionized child rearing in America could hardly have a more apt subtitle. Dr. Benjamin Spock was a classic American rebel, a man who rejected conventional wisdom in favor of experiential truth. From his birth on May 2, 1903, to his death on March 15, 1998, Spock embraced many of the 20th century's defining social and intellectual trends, from Freudianism to antiwar protest.

Yet all his actions sprang from a deeply ingrained sense of morality not so different from that of his decidedly Victorian mother. "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." With these words in the 1946 first edition of Baby and Child Care , Spock lobbed a gentle bomb into the world of pediatric advice, dominated in the first half of the century by authoritarian scolds. The radicalism of Spock's basic idea--more attention to developing a child's individual nature and less to regulating it by rigid rules--was made palatable by his warm tone. He was a friend providing information, not Moses handing down the law; he bolstered parents' self-confidence. Investigative journalist Thomas Maier seamlessly interweaves social and medical history with a cogent recap of the text and an examination of Spock's underlying intentions to explain why Baby and Child Care was such an innovative book and what made it so popular with the young couples just settling down to raise the baby-boom generation. He is equally balanced on his subject's personal life. Maier credits the substantial contributions of Spock's first wife, Jane, to Baby and Child Care but also depicts her mental illness and alcoholism.

He acknowledges that America's most trusted baby doctor was a distant and overly critical father but doesn't beat Spock over the head with his personal failings. The author makes sensitive use of interviews with Spock and his second wife, Mary, his two sons, friends, and other family members to give a three- dimensional portrait of an admirable but imperfect human being "[whose] book sometimes seemed better at handling relationships than the author." Maier's thoughtful coverage of Spock's controversial political activism--from demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the 1960s to protests over cuts in social services during the Reagan Administration--reminds us that it emanated from the same world view consistently expressed in all the editions of Baby and Child Care. Spock was indeed "one of the great liberals of the 20th century," but he was a liberal in the broadest sense, like the young parents who read his book so eagerly: "These parents wanted to be better than the generation before them, to make their families as happy as possible," Maier writes with typical perceptiveness. "They truly believed, perhaps far too naively, that with a self-help guide like Dr.

Spock's baby book they could achieve this goal." A very American vision: both idealistic and a bit ingenuous--very much like the man portrayed with such affection and insight in this worthy biography. -- Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. How Dr. Spock destroyed America How Dr. Spock destroyed America Exclusive: Reb Bradley asserts author's child-care book cultivated narcissism in millions Published: 01/27/2009 at 12:00 AM Print In the last 50 years, our nation has taken a moral nosedive. Since 1960, the rate of violent crimes has more than tripled. Every day there are news reports of heinous crimes unheard of in America a generation ago. Children murder their playmates, their teachers and their parents. Teenage mothers abandon their newborn babies in trashcans, and every year students commit carnage on their classmates. Our culture has sunk so low that children are no longer safe with their teachers in school or at church – scores of men and women are arrested every year for preying on the children under their care. The sexual revolution that started in the ’60s continues with many casualties.

Promiscuity has become so rampant that 1 of every 4 teenage girls now has a sexually transmitted infection. In the last five decades, practices have become so deviant that the number of distinct STDs had risen from five to more than 50 – a sudden increase of a thousand percent. Obsession with sexual violence has brought a 318 percent increase in sexual assault. Our nation is in severe moral decline, and the descent is not slowing. The root cause of decline in America is not that difficult to deduce. When a society becomes out of control, it is because its members elevate self-indulgence and lack self-control. It really is that simple. In the last 50 years, human nature has not changed. Selfishness, lust, covetousness and all other passions are in the human heart at birth. It is only a trained proclivity to say NO to our natural drives that keeps our passions in check – self-control is what stops us from stealing, murdering and committing adultery. It is parents who must instill this important quality in each generation. History and common sense teach us that the society in which children are not taught to keep control of their passions is destined to moral disintegration.

In America the reason that baby boomers and their children have grown up with less mastery over their passions than previous generations is because in the late ’40s a new voice of authority on parenting rose to prominence, and parents of the ’50s and ’60s began to raise children differently than before. In 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock first published his infamous book “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,” which was unlike any that came before it. Instead of stressing the importance of teaching self-denial and respect for authority, Spock discouraged directive training and emphasized accommodating children’s feelings and catering to their preferences. No longer did children learn they could endure Brussels sprouts and suffer through daily chores. Using Spock’s approach, parents began to feed self-indulgence instead of instilling self-control – homes were becoming child-centered. As parents elevated children’s “freedom of expression” and natural cravings, children became more outspoken, defiant and demanding of gratification. In fact, they came to view gratification as a right. Spock wrote his book in response to a cold, authoritarian philosophy of parenting that had been dominant in America.

For years, parents had been told to withhold affection from their children – not to touch them too often – not to respond to their tears. Understanding of children had not been encouraged, and fathers had held a minor role in their nurture and care. These things distressed Spock, and they would have upset me had I been born back then. Children need our tender affection, understanding and respect. However, Spock’s solutions reflected total ignorance of the hedonistic bent of human nature and fostered an over-exalted sense of self-importance in children. Homes became hotbeds for narcissism, entitlement and victim thinking. In the early ’60s, under Spock’s influence, parents were watching their children become sassy and contentious, and increasing numbers were seeing them become juvenile delinquents and criminals. As the crime rate started to crawl up, SAT scores began to drop. Teenagers began to exercise less moral restraint and revealed an increasing contempt for authority. The free-love hippy movement and student protests were inevitable for children who had been raised to think too highly of themselves. Is it any surprise that Spock himself participated in protests and was arrested in 1968 because of his contempt for governmental authority?

In 1972, Spock’s imbalanced view of child rearing became greatly apparent when he entered the presidential race as the candidate for the socialistic People’s Party. Anyone who embraces socialism is clueless to a key element of proper parenting – personal responsibility. What Spock’s actions reveal about the weaknesses of his philosophies is obvious, but some doubt that Spock’s influence was that pervasive. However, in the first year, his book sold 750,000 copies, and within six years it sold more than 4 million. It has since sold over 50 million and has been translated into more than 40 languages. According to Dr. Spock’s website, it is second in sales only to the Bible. Life magazine certified the depth of his influence, naming Spock among the 100 most important people of the 20th century. Even Dr. Spock was aware of his negative influence upon parents. In a 1968 interview with the New York Times, Spock admitted that his first edition of “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” contributed to an increase of permissive parenting in America.

“Parents began to be afraid to impose on the child in any way,” he said. In his 1957 edition, he tried to remedy that by emphasizing the need for setting standards and asking for respect. Unfortunately, Spock failed to see the deeper problems of his philosophy, so subsequent editions continued to cultivate narcissism. As Spock’s radical parenting ideas grew in popularity, other “experts” jumped on the bandwagon and promoted their own versions of indulgent child rearing. Since 1946, parenting approaches that foster narcissism and contempt for authority have become the accepted norm in higher education and subsequently, in society. It is a simple matter to trace the dominant hedonism of our culture back to Spock’s influence. And since the parenting we receive in childhood develops the worldview we hold as adults, Spock influenced not only how American’s conduct themselves in society, but how they approach government as well. Interestingly enough, in the 1968 New York Times interview, Spock admitted that he would “be proud if the idealism and militancy of youth today were caused by my book.” Raising children to adulthood with a defiant attitude toward authority was apparently one of his goals.

Spock died in 1998, and my intent is not to malign a man in the grave – it is to rescue America before we expire from moral disintegration. We must, therefore, identify and abandon the polluted well from which we have been drinking. Those interested in repairing the damage done by Spock, both in the family and in society at large, will want to read “Born Liberal Raised Right: How to Rescue America from Moral Decline – One Family at a Time.” It lays out a clear analysis of the problem and a simple plan for recovery. Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care: 8th Edition - Benjamin, M.D. Spock, Robert Needlman - Google Books Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care: 8th Edition 3 Reviews OVER 50 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT! THE CLASSIC THAT CONTINUES TO GROW WITH THE TIMES! For sixty-five years, parents have relied on the expert advice of renowned pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. But while children never change, issues and concerns do. Dr.

Robert Needlman, himself a top-notch pediatrician, has newly updated and expanded this timeless classic to speak to any parent who is raising children in our rapidly changing world. While still providing reassuring advice on age-old topics such as caring for a new baby, as well as accidents, illness, and injuries, this book also contains expanded information in many new areas, including: • Cutting-edge medical opinion on immunizations • Obesity and nutrition • Cultural diversity and nontraditional family structures • Children's learning and brain development • The newest thinking on children with special needs • Environmental health • Increasingly common disorders such as ADHD, depression, and autism— including medications and behavioral interventions • Children and the media, including electronic games • Coping with family stress • And much, much more With an updated glossary of common medications and an authoritative list of the most reliable online resources, this invaluable guide is still the next best thing to Dr. Spock's #1 rule of parenting: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” What people are saying - Write a review Updated classic User Review - CupertinoLady - Target This is an updated version of the book that helped me raise my kids 30 years ago.

Almost any question about baby care or child rearing is covered. The best book of it's kind out there. It has saved me ... Read full review The It Book User Review - kupkakessoftail - Overstock.com Iwas given this book many years agowhen I became pregant with my daugther.When I found out I was going to a Grand Maw I bought the book for my daugtherand she feels that this is a Great Book for the ... Read full review All Book Search results &raquo; About the author (2004) Benjamin Spock, M.D., practiced pediatrics in New York City from 1933 to 1947. He then became a medical teacher and researcher at the Mayo Clinic, the University of Pittsburgh, and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The author of eleven books, he was a political activist for causes that vitally affect children: disarmament, day care, schooling, housing, and medical care for all. He had two sons, a stepdaughter, and four grandchildren. Dr. Spock, who died March 15, 1998, at age ninety-four, was married to Mary Morgan. Dr.

Spock's Baby and Child Care has been translated into thirty-nine languages and has sold fifty million copies worldwide since its first publication in 1946. Dr. Robert Needlman grew up in Chicago, attending the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where his mother was a preschool teacher. He graduated from Yale University with a BA in English Literature and earned his MD from Yale Medical School. He trained in General Pediatrics and Developmental and Behavioral� Pediatrics at Boston City Hospital, where he led the development of Reach Out and Read, a project to promote reading aloud.� ROR programs now help millions of children to grow up loving books (learn more at �� In addition to being the revising co-author of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 8th and 9th editions, he is the author of Dr. Spock’s Baby Basics and writes for Drspock.com.� Dr. Needlman practices and teaches Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland and is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. �He lives in Cleveland with his wife, Carol Farver, a surgical pathologist and educator. Their daughter, Grace, is a graduate of Yale University, where she majored in Art.

Bibliographic information Featured Subject: Benjamin Spock Featured Subject: Benjamin Spock From the Archives of The New York Times Related Links Dr. Benjamin Spock with a happy 3-month-old in Boston in 1993, shortly before he turned 90. Credit: The Associated Press ' The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care ' (1946) "Especially helpful and timely are sections on nursery schools, on separated parents, on adopting a child, and on mothers who work. Dr. Spock interprets the best in modern thinking on these subjects, and underscores it with his own wide experience, kindliness and good sense." "[A]t the age of 86, the doctor has written a rather casual but charming memoir." ARTICLES ABOUT BENJAMIN SPOCK: Dear Dr. Spock | Letters about the Vietnam War to America's Favorite Baby Doctor | Books - NYU Press | NYU Press Letters about the Vietnam War to America's Favorite Baby Doctor History Military History Author Michael S. Foley is associate professor of history at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. He is the author of Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War.

All books by Michael S. Foley At the height of the Vietnam War, thousands of Americans wrote moving letters to Dr. Benjamin Spock, America’s pediatrician and a high-profile opponent of the war. Personal and heartfelt, thoughtful and volatile, these missives from Middle America provide an intriguing glimpse into the conflicts that took place over the dinner table as people wrestled with this divisive war and with their consciences. Providing one of the first clear views of the home front during the war, Dear Dr. Spock collects the best of these letters and offers a window into the minds of ordinary Americans. They wrote to Spock because he was familiar, trustworthy, and controversial. His book Baby and Child Care was on the shelves of most homes, second only to the Bible in the number of copies sold. Starting in the 1960s, his activism in the antinuclear and antiwar movements drew mixed reactions from Americans—some puzzled, some supportive, some angry, and some desperate. Most of the letters come from what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority”—white, middleclass, law-abiding citizens who the president thought supported the war to contain Communism.

In fact, the letters reveal a complexity of reasoning and feeling that moves far beyond the opinion polls at the time. One mother of young children struggles to imagine how Vietnamese women could endure after their village was napalmed, while another chastises Spock for the “dark shadow” he had cast on the country and pledges to instill love of country in her sons. What emerges is a portrait of articulate Americans struggling mightily to understand government policies in Vietnam and how those policies did or did not reflect their own sense of themselves and their country. Reviews “The letters collected contain an array of opinions about the war, of both the hawk and dove variety. The scores of letters in this collection both praise and vilify Dr. Spock for his antiwar activism.” —The VVA Veteran “From thousands of letters written to Dr. Benjamin Spock during the Vietnam War, Foley has carefully culled 218 missives from America’s silent majority. . . . Many may find the frustration, fear and grief expressed here newly relevant.” —Publishers Weekly “These letters—with Michael S. Foley's astute and informed commentary—make clear why and how so many Americans trusted Benjamin Spock.

The body politic sorely needs a Doctor Spock today.” —James Carroll, author of Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War “Foley has discovered a unique source on the American home front during the Vietnam War, a perspective that moves us past the usual images of angry polarization. These powerful letters help us to consider how war-times induce people to look with new eyes at their nation and their government.” —David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s “Few documentary collections offer such an immediate connection to the years in which the Vietnam War was fought. Reading these letters now, when the U.S. is once again at war, is a profoundly moving experience.” —Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 eBooks New York University Press is proud to make many of our titles available in eBook editions. Below is the list of vendors that carry our titles in electronic format. Each vendor has its own pricing and delivery policies. Please follow the links below for more information. History Dr. Spock's The Common Book of Baby and Child Care Share By Jennifer Rosenberg Dr.

Benjamin Spock's revolutionary book about how to raise children was first published on July 14, 1946. The book, The Common Book of Baby and Child Care, completely changed how children were raised in the latter half of the 20th century and has become one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time. Dr. Spock Learns About Children Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-1998) first began learning about children as he grew up, helping take care of his five younger siblings. Spock earned his medical degree at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1924 and focused on pediatrics. However, Spock thought he could help children even more if he understood psychology, so he spent six years studying at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Spock spent many years working as a pediatrician but had to give up his private practice in 1944 when he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve. After the war, Spock decided on a teaching career, eventually working for the Mayo Clinic and teaching at such schools as the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and Case Western Reserve.

continue reading below our video Test Your General Science Knowledge Dr. Spock's Book With the aid of his wife, Jane, Spock spent several years writing his first and most famous book, The Common Book of Baby and Child Care. The fact that Spock wrote in a congenial manner and included humor made his revolutionary changes to child care easier to accept. Spock advocated that fathers should play an active role in raising their children and that parents will not spoil their baby if they pick him up when he cries. Also revolutionary was that Spock thought that parenting could be enjoyable, that each parent could have a special and loving bond with their children, that some mothers could get "the blue feeling" ( postpartum depression ), and that parents should trust their instincts. The first edition of the book, especially the paperback version, was a big seller right from the start. Since that first 25-cent copy in 1946, the book has been repeatedly revised and republished. So far, Dr. Spock's book has been translated into 42 languages and sold more than 50 million copies. Dr. Spock did write several other books, but his The Common Book of Baby and Child Care remains his most popular.

Revolutionary What seems like ordinary, normal advice now was completely revolutionary at the time. Before Dr. Spock's book, parents were told to keep their babies on a strict schedule, so strict that if a baby was crying before its prescribed feeding time that parents should let the baby continue crying. Parents were not allowed to "give in" to the child's whims. Parents were also instructed not to coddle, or show "too much" love, to their babies for that would spoil them and make them weak. If parents were uncomfortable with the rules, they were told that doctors know best and thus they should follow these instructions anyway. Dr. Spock said just the opposite. He told them that babies don't need such strict schedules, that it is okay to feed babies if they are hungry outside the prescribed eating times, and that parents should show their babies love. And if anything seemed difficult or uncertain, then parents should follow their instincts. New parents in the post- World War II era readily embraced these changes to parenting and raised the entire baby boom generation with these new tenets. Controversy There are some that blame Dr. Spock for the unruly, anti-government youth of the 1960s, believing that it was Dr.

Spock's new, softer approach to parenting that was responsible for that wild generation. Other recommendations in the earlier editions of the book have been debunked, such as putting your babies to sleep on their stomachs. We now know that this causes a greater incidence of SIDS . Anything so revolutionary will have its detractors and anything written seven decades ago will need to be amended, but that does not deflate the importance of Dr. Spock's book. It is not an overstatement to say that Dr. Spock's book completely changed the way parents raised their babies and their children.

Question: Dr Benjamin Spock wrote books on what subject?
Answer: Child care