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SPOCK, BENJAMIN 1903-

PEDIATRICIAN, AUTHOR

Baby Boom Influence

Benjamin Spock exerted enormous influence on the baby-boom generation (people born in 1946-1965) who came of age in the 1970s. Dr. Spock was a pediatrician, author, and social reformer who published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), an im-mediate best-seller and quickly one of the most influential books in postwar America. Retitled and republished as Baby and Child Care (1968, 1976, and 1985), it was an ideal guide for a country preoccupied with children and just the kind of gentle, warm, and thoughtful expert advice young parents needed in the baby-boom years. In contrast to prevailing child-rearing customs and advice, Spock emphasized affectionate and loving parenting, which was dubbed by his critics as permissiveness.

Against Vietnam

Reassuring parents that "You know more than you think you know," Dr. Spock became a household name as maternity hospitals and diaper ser-vices gave copies of the paperback to new parents. His articles and columns in the Ladies' Home Journal and Redbook magazines continued to popularize his sensitive, sensible notions of childhood and family life. In 1963 he was a public critic of the war in Vietnam, and in 1967 he retired as a professor of child development to work with the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In 1968 Spock was convicted of conspiracy to violate the selective service laws. The conviction was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals, making Dr. Spock an elderly hero to the young and anathema to their conservative parents.

Critics of Permissiveness

A wide range of social problems in the 1970s—drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, juvenile delinquency, and even the hippie movement—were attributed by such conservatives to Dr. Spock's permissiveness. Parents who took Spock's advice to raise children gently and indulgently were blamed for social and moral decay. He responded to his critics by frequent television and newspaper interviews, and in 1976 he revised his best-seller to eliminate outdated sexism and to include fathers, baby-sitters and day-care services. Dr. Spock remains an influential spokesman for modern child rearing today.