When he reached voting age, he marked his first ballot for Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Five decades later, he ran for President himself. But it is what he accomplished in between that made Dr. Benjamin Spock one of the most famous and controversial figures of his century. He single-handedly changed the way parents raise their children. He preached, albeit gently, that what infants need most from their mothers and fathers is love. Babies are not, he argued (against the prevailing wisdom of the times), little savages who must be broken to adult schedules as quickly as possible. Don't rush them, he urged; cherish them. Small wonder, then, that for millions of parents who followed Dr. Spock's advice with their children, who then did the same with theirs, news of his death last week at age 94 felt like a loss in the family.
So ubiquitous has Spock's name become that hardly anyone remembers the title of his most famous book, which has sold 50 million copies in 42 languages. In fact, there were two titles. The hardcover edition, published in 1946, was called The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care; the paperback, priced at 25[cents], was The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care.
But the tone of the prose inside was so soothing and personal that anxious parents who consulted it felt as if Spock himself were at their elbows telling them not to worry. "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do," he advised. He made sly jokes to suggest that strict rules were overrated: "How to fold a cloth diaper depends on the size of the baby and of the diaper."
Books do not always reflect their authors' real-life personalities, but Spock's did. He was as he seemed: modest, funny, empathetic, confident enough in his own knowledge not to be stuffy about it. He was also a most unlikely revolutionary.
He grew up in comfortable circumstances, the eldest of six children, in New Haven, Conn. His lawyer father ceded child-raising duties to Spock's flamboyant, histrionic mother, who smothered her firstborn with love, rules and high expectations. During his first year at nearby Yale, the young man was expected to live at home and return each day for lunch. He eventually wheedled permission to room on campus, where he became, in several respects, a big man. Not only did he shoot up to 6 ft. 4 in., he also rowed on the Yale crew that won a gold medal for the U.S. in the 1924 Olympics in Paris.
While at Yale, he met Jane Cheney, a Bryn Mawr student to whom he proposed on their first date. Although Spock's mother had a low opinion of Bryn Mawr, Spock and Cheney were married in 1927. By that time, Spock was enrolled at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York City, where he graduated first in his class in 1929 and set up a pediatric practice. His experiences during the 1930s were crucial to the development of his child-rearing theories. He realized that most of the problems brought to him were behavioral rather than medical: tantrums, thumb sucking, refusal to eat, sleep or potty-train on schedule. Concurrently, he grew interested in Freud and underwent psychoanalysis--twice.