Dr Spock: ‘I am not a permissive person’

Press, 15 April 1978, Page 16

Dr Spock: ‘I am not a permissive person’

B)

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD,

of “The Tinies,” through NZPA

The lobby of .he Savoy Hotel at five o'clock in the afternoon is full of Americans returning from a day in the shops. Dr Beniamin Spock, author of “Baby and Child Care,” is not hard to pick out among the burberrys and bright-checked trousers.

Not only is the face familiar from the day when he was America's most famous protester against the war in Vietnam. but he looks the part of baby doctor: immensely tall and thus rather imposing. fit, slightly gangling with an expression of mild and courteous benevolence.

His second wife, Mary, at least a foot shorter, and some 35 years younger, herds him affectionately about, like a spry sheepdog worrying a flock of particularly silly sheep. Dr Spock has been retired 10 years from his university post at Western Reserve, in Cleveland, Ohio, but he is no less active today than he was at the peak of his professorial life. A prolific writer of articles, and,

until recently, an energetic political campaigner, he is much in demand as a speaker, and much used as an example by other speakers as the man single-handedly responsible for the moral decay

of American youth. His statements about babies, no less than his pronouncements about nuclear disarmament, come ir. for praise, analysis, ridicule, and distortion, which may account for why. having said in an article in “Redbook” magazine in 1974 that it w'ould be no bad thing to return to some of the parental values of his childhood. he was widely considered to have "recanted.”

He says he became controversial very gradually, step by step. In 1946, a child doctor unusual in that his training had taken in not only pediatrics, but also psychology and pschiatry, he was asked to

write a book for parents about babies. The result, "Baby and Child Care,” sold three-quarters of a million copies in its first year. In America the book has been outsold only by the

Bible. “Twenty-five, 28 million copies? I really don’t know,” Dr Spock says with understandable relish.

Almost immediately after its publication he gave up general practice for the university career in child development he pursued until his retirement. But his developing views, and the changing society round him, have caused him to rewrite the book four times since then. The rewrites are all the more interesting in that they reflect not medical progress, but the evolution of Dr Spock.

The first revision in 1957 was to introduce the notion that parents should provide some leadership

for their children. “Babies,” he says, “were fast learning that all they needed to do was to glare at their mothers to be allowed to stay up until midnight.” The second rewrite

came in 1968, at the height of Dr Spock’s political activities, and very much as a mirror of them. Dr Spock was a latecomer to socialism. He was in his late fifties by the time he became director of SANE. (The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy). As the war in Vietnam escalated he led ever larger marches of parents and children to the United Nations, to Chicago, and New York. “I spoke to six universities a week. I got standing ovations. It was heady stuff for a professor.” In 1968, in Boston, he was arrested on a charge of helping young men to evade the draft. He was sentenced to two years in

prison, but never had to serve them. “The whole experience radicalised me,” he says. “I realised that the United States had always been as imperialist as it dared to be.” He helped to form the

People’s Party, for which he ran as president in 1972.

Sales of “Baby and Child Care,’’ which had been revised to include a spirit of "service to follow men,” plunged. Dr Spock was reviled from platforms all over America. The Rev. Norman Vincent Peale told his congregation from the pulpit it was Dr Spock’s fault that young Americans lacked guts; Spiro Agnew referred to hippies as the work of Spock; Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago, blamed the city’s ills on the Doctor’s corrupting influence.

“I hope you realise that you are a major oppressor of women, in the company

of Sigmund Freud,” Gloria Steinham thundered. Dr Spock was gratified by the company in which he found himself, but he took the criticism seriously. “I suppose I was a sexist,” he says contritely. The 1976 “Baby and Child Care” is scrupulously free of all sexism. Babies are “they” (though, he says with regret, “it makes them sound a bit like a crowd”). Mothers have become “parents.” And there are sections on the sharing of chores (leaf raking and garage-clean-ing) and the desirability of getting boys to play with dolls and girls to face up to becoming engineers and executives.

Dr Spock is a gentle and unassuming man to have attracted such opprobrium. He says of himself that he comes from a fiercely moralistic family and that he has never succeeded beyond his clothes (and they seem conservative enough) in being very debonaire. Critics have tried to read an oppressed childhood into the sane and

reasonable approach of “Baby and Child Care.” It is an error, says Dr Spock, just as it is quite qrong to say, as many have, that he has altered his views over the years. Version one and version four are in fact notcieably constant in attitude.

Dr Spock blames the confusion on the fact that conservatives who never read his book but assumed it was permissive only heard of him when he started talking about the need for providing children with leadership, and on a sensation-seeking press release put out by "Redbook” magazine (where he published the article that caused all the fuss in 1974). “I am not a permissive sort of person,” he explains.

The much quoted first words of “Baby and Child Care” are, “You know more than you think you do . . That is still Dr Spock’s message today, tempered by the fear that child specialists may have undermined anxious par-

ents and brainwashed them into believing that all firmness inhibits spontaneity, and causes children to harbour resentments against them. Dr Spock has moved many steps forward, but his point of departure has not altered.

Today Dr Spock divides his life between a solar house he has built on the edge of a lake in Arkansas (to be near Mary’s daughter, Ginger) and a yacht he sails in Maine or in the Caribbean. He answers an enormous correspondence, and speaks publicly when asked to on child development, but not as often now as he would like to on politics.

“Since I am convinced that the root of our troubles in the materialist, intensive, capitalist society,” he said, "I feel it would be better to meet it head on, and not tinker with it by saying we need more nursery schools, but that the whole damn political and economic system must be changed.”