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The 100 best nonfiction books / No 33 / The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 33 – The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)

The groundbreaking American childcare manual urged parents to trust themselves, but was also accused of being the source of postwar ‘permissiveness’

Robert McCrum

Monday 12 September 2016

Practically speaking, Dr Spock’s compendious Baby and Child Care manual probably had a greater impact on the lives of postwar Americans (and some Britons) than any other title in this list so far. Spock came to shape the baby-boom generation like no other bestseller, mainly because his book was a bestseller like no other. It has sold more than 50 million copies in print, in 49 languages.

Benjamin Spock, centre, talks with his lawyers, during a break from his trial for conspiring to counsel young men to evade the draft in 1968.

Spock’s chapter titles convey both his approach and his pre-feminist perspective: “Watching him grow”; “He’s apt to change his eating habits”; “The father as companion”; “Trouble with lessons”. Nothing was too trivial to escape Spock’s radar. In his pages, the worried parent could find help for virtually every problem.

Spock’s secret, which comes as a shock on an initial reading, 70 years after first publication, was to offer fundamentally conventional, even banal, advice in a revolutionary way. For instance, in the most reassuring tones, as smooth as silk, he told postwar mothers that they knew more than they realised and should simply trust their maternal instincts. As an American, he also made the project of childhood a recapitulation of man’s ascent from primeval swamps: “There’s nothing in the world more fascinating than watching a child grow… Each child as he develops is retracing the whole history of mankind, physically and spiritually, step by step.”

Where previous American parenting guides were stern and repressive, Spock was humane, benign and borderline permissive, based on – this was really radical – his devout reading of Freud. After several years as a young paediatrician in New York during the 1930s, Spock’s line to parents was “trust yourself”. He established this earth-shattering credo from the very first sentence of Baby and Child Care: “You know more than you think you do.” This would set the tone for the childcare of the postwar era and would sponsor the development of a generation of children raised in an atmosphere of self-conscious warmth and flexibility – at least on the surface.

Spock also projects a seductive, aw-shucks pragmatism on every page of Baby and Child Care. He insists his is not the last word, that mothers and fathers always know best and that “natural loving care” is the only way to go. Spock is also profoundly American in outlook. “Your baby is born to be a reasonable, friendly human being,” he writes, in words that could have been written by Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. Later, reflecting Enlightenment thought, he would argue quite passionately that the growing child is fundamentally and naturally good, sensible, joyful and healthy. At heart, Spock is anxious to swaddle the contentious and troubling business of parenthood in an aura of tolerance, restraint, common sense and tranquillity. He was against all forms of coercion and it was his conviction that children were likely to respond most positively to love and affection. He believed that adolescents should be taught that sex was “wholesome and natural and beautiful”. Who, you ask, could possibly take issue with that?

Well, the social historian Christopher Lasch was one. In 1979, in The Culture of Narcissism, a brilliant study of the postwar American mind, this passionate critic of US liberalism conducted a revisionist assault on the unexamined influence of Baby and Child Care. He made the good, and overlooked, point that Spock, for all his alleged permissiveness, had actually encouraged parental authority. “Often blamed for the excesses of permissive child-rearing,” wrote Lasch, “Spock should be seen instead as one of its critics, seeking to restore the rights of the parent in the face of an exaggerated concern for the rights of the child.”

Lasch argued that the second world war, together with the consumer culture of the 1950s, had sponsored a “culture of narcissism” that was now threatening traditional red-state American individualism. “Trust yourself” had been a powerful message addressed to middle America, but it was not the source of contemporary “permissiveness”. Lasch was perhaps the most brilliant of Spock’s critics, but there were many others, including former vice-president Spiro Agnew, who were provoked into criticism by Spock’s non-paediatric activities.

One difficulty with getting a clear reading on Spock comes from his midlife career as a radical peacenik during the many waves of protest against the Vietnam war. He had already been a fierce advocate of nuclear disarmament. Now, as he put it, he was “hooked for the peace movement”. Having signed a declaration entitled A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority and supported the burning of draft cards as an expression of free speech, he was charged and convicted of conspiracy to counsel, aid and abet resistance to the draft.

Thrust into the limelight for siding with the young generation, Spock found himself and his ideas under renewed scrutiny. Twenty years after he had first overturned conventional child-rearing wisdom, Spock was once again coming under fire, this time for helping to create a generation of self-centred narcissists, young people who lived only for themselves. Was it possible to trace mass anti-war protests to the pages of Baby and Child Care? Some people thought so and Spock thereafter struggled to shake off the accusation that he was the father of America’s psycho-social “decline”. Whatever the long-term outcome of this debate, one thing is certain: Baby and Child Care is woven into the landscape of the American imagination.

A signature sentence

“Every time you pick your baby up, even if you do it a little awkwardly at first, every time you change him, he’s getting a feeling that he belongs to you and that you belong to him.”