America’s Courtly, Wise Baby Doctor Continues to Empower Parents

Along with the family Bible, two books make their way to the hands of American mothers. One is “The Joy of Cooking,” a kitchen bible of sorts. The other is “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.”

Many new parents inherit the very dogeared paperback that their own mothers turned to. With its alphabetical approach, every issue from abscess (“breast, p. 136; ear, p. 568”) to zinc stearate powder is covered. You say your baby won’t eat vegetables? Page 184: “Don’t urge them, but try them again every month or so.”

A gentle man, courtly to a fault, Benjamin Spock, who died Sunday at the age of 94, contended that the book’s message was simple. “Trust yourself,” he wrote. “You know more than you think you do.” Before the term had even been invented, Spock gave parents a sense of empowerment. He gave mothers and fathers permission to follow their own instincts.

Among his fellow physicians this notion was heretical, when “Baby and Child Care” first appeared in 1946. But for most parents, it was a huge relief. His hard-to-please mother, who seldom approved of much of anything her son did, gave Spock a rare compliment when she read the manuscript. “A very sensible book, Benny,” pronounced Mildred Spock.

But inadvertently, “Baby and Child Care” also turned out to be a revolutionary manifesto, and Spock, in short order, was praised and vilified as the leader of a cultural insurrection. He became synonymous with the term “permissiveness,” and as the Baby Boom generation that was born as his book first appeared grew older and more rebellious, Spock and his philosophy took much of the blame. From facial hair to free love, from rock ‘n’ roll to radical politics, Dr. Spock was branded as the devil who started it all.

It didn’t help when the pediatrician mimicked the behavior of the generation he was charged with destroying. Unceremoniously, he discarded his first wife, the long-suffering Jane, to whom he was married for almost half a century and who had typed the first edition of the volume on a manual typewriter.

His new wife, Mary Morgan, was half his age, half his height and had twice his feistiness. Not coincidentally, Morgan had carried a copy of “Baby and Child Care” to the hospital when she gave birth to her daughter.

Spock grew a beard, became an antiwar protester and ran for president. His Peoples’ Party campaign never got off the ground, and when his political hopes faltered, he and Morgan settled into a comfortable schedule of winters in the Virgin Islands and summers in the idyllic seaside community of Camden, Maine.

There Spock, a member of the gold-medal-winning 1924 U.S. Olympics crew, rowed in the harbor every day, and was often seen in the local lobster pound, sharing crab cakes with Morgan. She in turn monitored his health with panther-like protectiveness. Although he hailed from hardy New England stock, Spock credited his longevity to his wife’s fierce nurturing.

The pair considered their analyst to be part of their family, and talked freely about how individual, couples and group therapy helped to sustain their marriage. But the private life of America’s guru of parenthood was not without tragedy. His son Michael took his own life by leaping from a Boston building, an act that left his father devastated and confused.

Tall and gangling, Spock was unfailingly polite. Although he was married to an ardent feminist and was an adamant supporter of equal rights for the sexes himself, Spock always held doors open for women--even after he revised “Baby and Child Care” to include a section on sexism. When a pregnant interviewer visited him in Camden, he fussed over her condition and sent her home with a book inscribed to the unborn baby. In a follow-up interview the next year, his first question was about the child: “How’s Sam?” he asked.

In that same series of interviews, Spock professed to have been misunderstood all along. “The book was out 22 years before I ever heard the word ‘permissive,’ ” he maintained. He had no grand agenda, no design on child rearing, he added.

Rather, he said strangers often approached him at airports or on the streets. “I don’t think the book was permissive,” was how they frequently began their conversations, Spock said.

“Baby and Child Care” also launched a sturdy bookselling genre. Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of Harvard always acknowledges his debt to Spock, as does British writer Penelope Leach. Both are authors of top-selling child-care books. But neither comes close in sales to Spock’s 50 million books, marketed in 37 countries.

Spock’s classic volume, said Ron Taffel, a child and family therapist in New York and a contributing editor of Parents Magazine, “was the ‘Gone With the Wind’ ” of parenting books.

In his later years, Spock still lectured on children’s issues and continued to testify on child welfare concerns. He acknowledged the flood of mothers into the workplace, for example, and said the trend was probably good--reasoning that a satisfied mother makes for a happy child.

Spock’s influence on American families persists as new parents who were raised on Dr. Spock still turn to his book for guidance when their children break out in hives or refuse to eat spinach. A recent pitch letter from Mary Morgan to legions of Spock’s supporters, seeking funds to pay for round-the-clock medical care for the failing nonagenarian, might have clouded the image of a less steady figure.

But Spock’s gracious tenacity made it hard to think of him as anything but a thoughtful, caring pediatrician: America’s baby doctor. And far from telling parents to let their children run the household, never mind the world, his philosophy was uncomplicated, Dr. Spock insisted: Follow your instincts, protect your child--and love that young boy or girl, every minute, every day.

Times staff writer Lynn Smith contributed to this article.