Bringing Dr. Spock Up to Date

By John Leo

Donald Geddes, a former editor at Pocket Books, made the sales pitch of his life in 1943. Badgering a reluctant pediatrician who felt that he lacked the knowledge to attempt a book on babies, Geddes tried a bit of psychological % judo. At 25 cents a copy, he declared, a baby book was bound to sell briskly no matter what it said. So, he concluded, "the book we want doesn't have to be very good."

"That hit the spot," recalls Benjamin Spock, 42 years and 30 million copies later. "The fact that he didn't say, 'We want the best damned book in the world'--I figured, Why not take a try?"

Spock had some reason for diffidence at the time. He was then groping his way toward an understanding of how to nurture infants and small children. But he re-searched so shrewdly, foraging among psychoanalytic concepts and heeding the advice of embattled mothers, that Baby and Child Care turned out to be an instant hit and an enduring classic.

The paperback book costs a bit more now, $4.95. The 40th-anniversary edition has a new title, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, and a co-author, Michael B. Rothenberg, 58, a Seattle pediatrician and child psychiatrist at the University of Washington who has signed on to update the book periodically until the end of this century. Despite four revisions, the core of the book, the psychosocial recommendations to parents, is basically unchanged. Every now and then a child-development expert grumbles that Spock has not kept up. But the author says, with much justice, that he simply got it right the first time around: "I don't mean to sound smug, but I haven't had to swallow any words so far. The book is sensible and sensitive, and it's not very easy to criticize."

With the help of two consultants, Rothenberg rewrote the entire medical- pediatric section of the book, bringing it up-to-date with new findings since the last revision in 1976. One such change: eggs are no longer recommended for infants under nine months of age because the iron in the yolk is poorly absorbed by babies and may interfere with the absorption of iron from other foods. The co-authors added and expanded sections on the role of fathers in childbirth, breast-feeding for working mothers, and child abuse and neglect. Spock, a ban-the-bomb advocate since 1962, included a personal note sternly urging parents to vote for candidates who favor a nuclear freeze.

Still fit and trim at 81, Spock keeps up the acti vist life, lobbying and demonstrating against nuclear weapons. He accepts dozens of speaking engagements a year, three-quarters of them political, and he says he is willing to visit Nicaragua if it would help ease U.S. hostility to the Sandinista regime. He and his second wife, Mary Morgan, 41, spend the winters aboard their boat Carapace in the British Virgin Islands and most of the rest of the year in Maine and Arkansas.

Spock was born in New Haven, Conn., in 1903, the oldest of six children of a well-to-do railroad lawyer and his wife. The home was "child-centered" and loving, he says, but his mother was a "fiercely opinionated, moralistic, rather tyrannical person." Young Ben and his siblings ate separately from their parents, had to be in bed by 6:45 each evening and were even forbidden to eat certain foods, such as bananas, until they were twelve. This had the predictable result of inducing a certain amount of bananaphobia as the twelfth birthday approached. Spock concludes: "There must be easier and pleasanter ways to raise children than the severity we had."

Spock's mother considered herself more liberal in child-rearing matters than her own parents, just as Spock's two sons think he was too conservative. Says Spock: "They say I should have touched, hugged and kissed them more. It's a different environment now." Spock had a harder time reaching rapport with his stepdaughter Ginger, 19. Says he: "The step- relationship is a naturally cursed and poisonous one."

Spock had a sheltered, hard-shell conservative upbringing in a solidly Republican household. He went to Andover, Yale, Yale Medical School and had switched to Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons before meeting his first Democrat. He says he was "absolutely flabbergasted" to find that university-educated people need not be Republicans. At Yale, he took up crew and rowed his way to a gold medal in the 1924 Chariots of Fire Olympics. The victory was "of enormous importance," he says, converting an overprotected mama's boy into a confident young man.

After medical school, he took a year of psychiatric residency at Cornell Medical College in New York City, where he had an eye-opening brush with the Freudian ideas that were just beginning to percolate through American culture. "If I deserve any credit, it's for this idea that I should have some psychological training," Spock says. "It still mystifies me that I was so sure I needed that."

In 1933 he opened his own pediatrics practice in New York City and spent ten "very agonizing years" trying to apply psychoanalytic teachings to child care. Spock knew that early toilet training, for instance, could cause severe psychological problems, "but when I'd turn to my psychoanalytic mentors and say, 'What do you think you should tell parents about toilet training?' they'd shrug their shoulders." He found himself giving advice before he was sure that it was right. "I would give the best answer I could think of and then eagerly question the mother when she brought the baby back a month later," he recalls. "So I really learned it all from mothers."

Along the way, Spock became the first of the anti-expert experts. His own best seller on child care cautions mothers to take even his tips with several grains of salt. In all editions, the first paragraph of the book begins, "You know more than you think you do," and the next paragraph says, "Don't be overawed by what the experts say. Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense." A friendly and homey prose style, at once humble and authoritative, has convinced millions of mothers that he is an author who can be trusted. "He put everybody in a more laid-back attitude toward raising children," says Memphis Pediatrician James Hughes.

Everywhere he goes, Spock is asked about "the permissiveness issue," the charge that the doctor encouraged several generations of parents to ease up on discipline and give their children more free rein. "For 22 years, nobody said the book was permissive," he says. "That all started with Norman Vincent Peale." In 1968 Spock, a leader in the anti-Viet Nam protests, was indicted for conspiracy to counsel draft resistance. (He was found guilty, but the conviction was overturned in 1969.) Peale, an author and politically conservative minister, denounced Spock from his pulpit and charged that the student uprisings of the time were the result of Spock's permissive advice to unwary parents. Then Vice President Spiro Agnew took up the same theme, though Spock's book is clear about setting both standards and expectations for children. Says Spock: "If parents are self-assured and nonhostile, they can be quite strict in such things as expecting more formal manners, prompt obedience and more courtesies. It doesn't hurt children at all to have cooperation expected of them."

Peale and Agnew had a point of sorts but the wrong villain. In the 1940s and 1950s an airy permissiveness arose that may have contributed to the great campus tantrums of the late 1960s. Says Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton of Harvard Medical School: "The parents I was taking care of in the '50s were terribly concerned that their children be pleased at all times. But that's not Ben's fault. If you look in the book, there's nothing permissive in there."

Spock thinks his contribution has not been lax discipline, but more relaxed parents. "The main effect of the book is to give parents confidence, and I think I succeeded better than I ever thought I could."

With reporting by Barry Kalb/New York