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COMMON SENSE BOOK OF BABY AND CHILD CARE

COMMON SENSE BOOK OF BABY AND CHILD CARE. Written during World War II by pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and his first wife, Jane Cheney Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946, and six subsequent editions) became the most widely read child-rearing manual of the twentieth century. It offered anxious, middle-class mothers precise and accessible advice and a new, more flexible approach to discipline, derived from the educational theory of John Dewey and the psychology of Sigmund Freud. What Reverend Norman Vincent Peale labeled "permissive" child-rearing came under attack in the late 1960s for producing a generation of spoiled radicals. In the 1970s feminists attacked the book for content oppressive to women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Spock, Benjamin, M.D., and Mary Morgan. Spock on Spock: A Memoir of Growing Up with the Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.

Weiss, Nancy Pottishman. "Mother, The Invention of Necessity: Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care." American Quarterly 29 (winter 1977):519–546.

Zuckerman, Michael. "Dr. Spock: The Confidence Man." In The Family in History. Edited by Charles E. Rosenberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975.

William Graebner

See also Childhood; Family.