The New York Times notes a milestone: This year Baby Boomers start turning 65, and for the next 19 years, about 10,000 a day “will cross that threshold.” This is the story of the man who helped shape them.
In 1945, millions of Americans came back from World War II and began to beget. The next year, a pediatrician named Benjamin Spock wrote the child-rearing bible for those Boomers, a book that would reach more readers than any other in history except the Bible itself.
“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” was more than a manual–it changed the mindset of parents from treating children as creatures to be trained and restrained to seeing them as human beings to be loved and nurtured.
Books before Spock’s favored “less sentimentality and more spanking,” discouraged playing with children and were dubious about affection. “Infants,” one warned, “should be kissed, if at all, upon the cheek or forehead, but the less of this the better.” Another agreed: “Shake hands with them in the morning.”
Dr. Spock rejected all this. “Trust yourself,” his book began. “You know more than you think you do.”
Over 50 million readers began to do just that and turn to Spock for everything their children did and didn’t do from the minute they came home from the hospital to the day they left for college.
The life of the man who changed childhood for Americans spanned the century. Born in 1903, Benjamin McLane Spock went to medical school to become a pediatrician, trained in psychiatry when he decided children’s minds were as important as their bodies, wrote the Book, became a beloved national figure and, in his seventies, risked everything to stop the threat of nuclear war.
When he died in 1998, Dr. Spock left behind not only his achievements as the Boomers’ pediatrician but their godfather, a man of conscience who spent the last decades of a long life trying to keep them from “being incinerated in an imbecilic war.”
His life reflects 20th century America, from isolation and innocence through wars, cultural upheavals and political chaos, as a man who embodied the nation’s bedrock values and tried to uphold them in a complex world.
In Dr. Spock’s later years, I saw his struggles up close as editor of his magazine columns, publisher of his most passionate book and, most of all, his friend.