Dr. Spocks Baby and Child Care 6th Edition
Of course I don’t know why she didn’t, and I don’t know if picking him up would have calmed him, but I expect if she had obeyed her instinct, she would have known what to do.
But we didn’t and we don’t obey our instincts; we’ve been trained to ignore them over the millennium. How grateful I am that somehow or another I found Dr. Spock’s book on baby and child care just in time to reinforce what I already knew.
“Trust yourself,” he wrote to all of us confused and intimidated by our newborns’ demands. “You know more than you think.”
I did know more than I thought I did, but like the mother in the coffee line, I might have lacked the confidence to act on what I knew especially at a time when Dr. John B. Watson’s 1920 advice was “Mother love is a dangerous influence… which may inflict a never healing wound.”
When my first son was born in the old Boston Lying-in Hospital, I knew I wanted to nurse him—not the accepted wisdom at the time—and I knew that in order to get the process started, he should stay in the hospital room with me—a procedure that later became common practice and was called “Rooming In.” But when I requested a cot for him next to mine, it seemed an aberration; bed rest for new mothers lasted a week in the hospital after the birth and meant the baby was only brought in at prescribed times, sure to defeat breast-feeding which at first must be done on demand in order to establish the milk flow and the baby’s sucking reflex.
Later, when we went home, I was unsettled by his constant crying but again, Dr. Spock came to my aid and I managed to create a sort of baby sling—there were none on the market then—in order to carry him around with me at a time when babies were pushed in carriages under hoods that made them almost invisible to the mother.
And I had the great good fortune of discovering the La Leche League, now an international organization, which meant that with the inevitable breast-feeding complexities, I could call (there were telephones then) at almost any hour of the day or night and get support and suggestions from another nursing mother.
Dr. Spock’s wisdom may seem almost a cliché now: he wrote that babies are not little savages to be forced into accepting adult regimens as soon as possible. It was always wiser to wait before pushing solid food, sleeping alone, or being fed formula. Years later, the Nestle Company—in a money-making operation—promoted its formula in Africa, a powder to be mixed with local water that was often contaminated. The result was disastrous. Dr. Spock knew better.
Today fifty million copies of Dr. Sock’s book have sold in 42 countries and yet his advice is still controversial. Trust yourself? Who are you, bedraggled sleep-deprived new mother, to trust yourself? Pick up that screaming child? This example of mother love is inflicting a life long wound.
Calming, soft-voiced, yet still revolutionary, Spock’s critics would see his activism in protesting the Vietnam War as another dangerous example of Trusting Yourself, and would even repeat a rumor that his son and grandson had committed suicide to prove the danger of his views. His grandson did kill himself at the age of twenty-two, but how many of us who have lost a son, as I have, need to lacerate ourselves with accusations? These tragedies, far too frequent in this culture, have many complex causes and can hardly be laid at the feet of a man who did so much good for so many.
There are several young women in my extended family who are pregnant; one is not sure she wants to keep the baby and I will certainly understand if she decides to have an abortion; fortunately she lives in a state where the procedure is still legal. In view of the extraordinary immaturity of many young white men, including unprepared or ill-prepared husbands, such a decision makes sense. When I look at photos of these two young fathers, I see the faces produced by the peculiar privilege that allows some white men to grow up without learning how to work or how to handle anything more demanding than going for a hike. I don’t wish that kind of father on any mother or any baby but perhaps if his hand happens to fall on Dr. Spock some of the worst damage might be avoided.
So forget the cute dresses and charming mobiles when you are shopping for a baby shower and instead give something so much more useful, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare.
Great article about a great man. The paste below from Wikipedia bolsters my view of his greatness:
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After undergoing a self-described “conversion to socialism”, Spock became an activist in the New Left and anti-Vietnam War movements during the ’60s and early ’70s, culminating in his run for President of the United States as the People’s Party nominee in 1972. He campaigned on a maximum wage, legalized abortion, and withdrawing troops from all foreign countries. His books were criticized by conservatives for propagating permissiveness and an expectation of instant gratification, a charge that Spock denied.