The Doc in the Hat
As preschoolers, my children
briefly confused Dr. Spock with Dr. Seuss, whom they assumed to be a cat with a
stovepipe hat. America's household pediatrician as the Cat in the Hat: The
image is unwittingly apt, linking two upstart heroes in the baby boomer
pantheon. A mother's helper with a bag of tricks that promised new fun for the
housebound, Dr. Benjamin Spock arrived on the postwar scene first. His Baby
and Child Care was published in 1946. It revealed his gift for juggling the
unbalanceable demands of life with children, and for sounding serenely jaunty
as he did it. It goes without saying that Spock, like the acrobatic Cat, proved
immensely popular and has remained so. What is perhaps less obvious is that,
much as the Cat made sure his messes were temporary, Spock was not as
subversive as lore suggests.
Spock's
purported iconoclasm is twofold. First, he is typically hailed (or, rarely now,
condemned) as a revolutionary who emboldened postwar parents to rebel against
the stern behaviorist style that had prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s. The
truth is somewhat different. Like most wildly popular figures, he was riding a
wave, not bucking the tide. His genial Freudian approach fit right in with the
reigning sociological wisdom, which championed the democratic, "affectionate"
family as the welcome successor to the hierarchical home of the past. Reviewers
of the first edition of Baby and Child Care praised its don't rock the
boat (but do rock the cradle) tone. Spock, the American Journal of Public
Health marveled, "has succeeded to an amazing degree in striking a middle
ground in his advice." That advice was seen to "typify the present-day
departure from rigidity in schedules and training."
Second, Spock is renowned for an unprecedentedly
confidence-inspiring pitch. "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you
do," he told his readers. Instead of struggling to "do everything
letter-perfect out of a feeling of worry," he counseled, try to relax and be
flexible. Children, trust them, have "a deep desire to grow up to be like the
parents they admire and love." Yet the message of simple reassurance turned out
to be more complicated, as Spock himself quickly discovered. The first expert
to say, "Don't be overawed by what the experts say," became an expert of
awesome influence overnight. (His book sold three-quarters of a million copies
in its first year, without advertising.) Flattered, Spock was also flustered to
discover just how dependent on his advice his fans had become. Was parental
autonomy weakening on his own watch?
Spock
frequently claimed that fears about "permissiveness" first surfaced in 1968,
voiced by critics of his antiwar activism. In fact, as early as in the second
edition of his classic, in 1957, he was worried that parents might be flailing.
They weren't friendly yet firm, as he had recommended. They were confused and
hesitant, overawed by their children. The son of an imposing Victorian
matriarch himself, he was surprised at how wobbly modern mothers seemed.
One mother stunned him by writing, "Don't you
realize that when you always emphasize that a child basically wants to behave
well, and will behave well if he is handled wisely, you make the parent
feel responsible for everything that goes wrong?"
Spock
took the question personally. He also astutely recognized it as a midcentury
symptom of a "fascinating and somewhat mysterious phenomenon, this one of the
parents of America being this nervous about doing right by their children." In
our anti-traditional culture, older generations had tended to be ambivalent
about their authority over younger ones. But now the swift pace of
technological change left parents less equipped than ever to prepare their
children for the future, even as children needed the preparation more
desperately. Science--in particular, psychology, Spock's own specialty--held
out a promise of newly fine-tuned control over their development.
Parents understandably felt under pressure, and Spock was
the rare expert who acknowledged their bewilderment. From then on, ministering
to 20 th century parental uneasiness became his real métier. Even in
its first edition, his manual was more encyclopedic than others, packed with
up-to-date medical and practical advice delivered in down-to-earth prose. He
saw to it that, over the years, it remained so. Just as important, he became
even more solicitously therapeutic. In a field intent on claiming objective,
"scientific" status, he didn't hesitate to admit that doctrinaire ideas
shifted, conflicted, and could be disorienting.
Spock's
own simplistic Freudian perspective, with its emphasis on childhood Oedipal
dramas and the wonders of sublimation, sounds more quaint every year. It's his
handling of the ambiguities of parenthood that is timeless. Called a
"confidence man" by one impatient critic, Spock indeed made a specialty of
delivering mixed messages to his insecure audience.
He set out in his book to calm parents, in the
process stirring up their anxiety. He urged them to rely on their instincts,
and went on to supply them with minute instructions. He emphasized children's
resilience, and was quick to suggest that problems require a specialist's
assistance. He started out psychologizing, and ended up moralizing. Through it
all, he prescribed spontaneity, an oxymoronic endeavor if ever there was
one.
But Spock's equivocations
were not evasions. On the contrary, they call attention to a truth less honest
advisers have preferred to obscure and parents only half want to hear: that
child rearing is a messy art of compromise and contradictions, full of
uncertainty. It is not a streamlined science. Spock did not cure American
mothers and fathers of their impossible dream of being "professional" parents
equipped with the developmentally correct answers. But he played an important
part in bringing realism to child rearing by being an unapologetic improviser
himself.
If he was sometimes a naive
political activist, Spock was always a resourceful pragmatist when it came to
child rearing wisdom. He let broad intuitions and motley experience guide him.
"I never looked at my records," he admitted about the writing of his classic.
"It really all came out of my head." All along, he treated his book as a
growing organism, not as a fixed system. Spock relied on his own resilience,
not science, to update his expertise for an era of feminism and family
disarray. His classic has thickened gracelessly over the years, but as the
forthcoming eighth edition once again shows, it has remained true to the
adaptable temperament it was born with. This one-of-a-kind creation has helped
spawn countless how-to manuals, but it's still easy to choose the indispensable
one. In Dr. Seuss' words: Well, what would you say, if a mother asked you?
