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What Spock really did in Baby and Child Care, which he started writing in 1943, was to sneak Freudian concepts into the American middle-class mind. Surmising that new parents were not yet ready to hear of their infants' oral, anal and genital stages, Spock simply advised moms and dads not to get alarmed if baby sometimes behaved, well, oddly. He had learned from Freud that repression could produce catastrophic adult neuroses. Better, he advised, to wait things out.
During the 1960s, when Spock and the first generation he had helped raise noisily protested the nuclear arms buildup and the war in Vietnam, critics blamed Spock's "permissive" book for causing all the uproar. "People who call the book permissive never use the book," Spock replied. "They never read it." He had a point. For all its emphasis on love, Spock's book equally stressed parents' obligations to set limits for their children, to teach them by example and precept "what's right and proper."
In his later years Spock acknowledged that he had not been an ideal husband, or a perfect father to his two sons, Michael and John. "I never kissed them [when they were young]," he said. His wife Jane, feeling neglected by her husband's fame and frequent travels, struggled with mental illness and alcoholism. The two were divorced in 1976. Jane died in 1989.
Shortly before Spock's death, his second wife Mary made an appeal to friends and admirers to help with her husband's medical bills, which had reached $16,000 a month. His lingering last days contrasted sadly with the vigor and energy of his life. He updated his book constantly, always trying to make it better. The seventh edition contains his "permissive" thoughts on children and video games: "Most computer games are a colossal waste of time." This book will be published on May 2, which would have been the good doctor's 95th birthday.