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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.