[On July 14th, 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock published the first edition of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. In that book and throughout his career Spock was one of our most vocal & vital early childhood educators and advocates, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other such advocates, leading up to a special weekend post on my favorite early childhood educator!]
On a universally meaningful book, historically grounded activism, and the links between the two.
Like any best-selling and hugely influential book, and certainly any one that has gone through ten quite distinct editions over a period of more than 70 years (with the 10th published in 2018), The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is not without its controversies and critiques, its flaws and fallacies, its need for complementary as well as challenging works by other experts. All of those contexts are worth engaging and need to be part of any conversation about Spock and his book, but none of them should distract us from the simple and unquestionable fact that this book fundamentally and positively changed conversations around parenting and child care. It did so right from its opening sentences, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do,” which took a radically different tone from prior parenting manuals like John B. Watson’s Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928; opening sentences, “The oldest profession of the race to-day is facing failure. This profession is parenthood.”). Spock’s book sought to empower parents rather than lecture or proscribe, and that basic but crucial element makes it an enduringly meaningful work.
While those multiple editions (the first seven of which were published while Spock was still alive) meant that the book took up a good bit of his work and life, it is nonetheless of course the case that he did many other things as well. Without doubt the most controversial things he did fell within the umbrella of anti-Vietnam War activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including (but not limited to): draft resistance advocacy that led to a criminal conviction (but no prison time) for conspiracy; signing a 1968 pledge to refuse to pay taxes that supported the war, which led to his sponsorship of the War Tax Resistance Project; support for the radical organization RESIST and their 1967 manifesto “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” which to another arrest; and becoming the presidential candidate for the People’s Party in the 1972 election. Ever the author, Spock also penned a short book during these years, Dr. Spock on Vietnam (1968), which addressed in the same common sense language he always used the two crucial questions of “How did we get in? And how do we get out?”
There doesn’t have to be any necessary link between Spock’s book and his Vietnam-era activism, as both were simply part of a long, complex, multilayered American life. But many conservative commentators sought to make such a link, with figures from the religious leader Norman Vincent Peale to Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew accusing Spock of advocating for parental “permissiveness” that created what Peale called “two generations that followed the Dr. Spock baby plan of instant gratification of needs.” And when Spock responded to those charges, throughout his life but with especial clarity in the first chapter of his last book, Rebuilding American Family Values: A Better World for Our Children (1994), he likewise linked his early childhood advocacy work to these broader aspects of his social and political perspectives. In that chapter he writes, “Many parents have [after those accusations of “permissiveness”] since stopped me on the street or in airports to thank me for helping them to raise fine children, and they’ve often added, ‘I don’t see any instant gratification in Baby and Child Care.’” I don’t either—just a world I’d infinitely rather live in than that of Peale, Agnew, et al.
Last early childhood educator tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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