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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."