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MORE THAN JUST A BESTSELLING CHILD-CARE GURU, THE LATE DOCTOR "SPOCK-MARKED" A GENERATION WITH HIS POLITICS. BY DWIGHT GARNER Like most parents I know, I've never cozied up to any particular child-rearing theories. How could I have? Raising kids isn't a clinical, exacting science -- it's an art project, a sloppy collage. You piece it together from instinct; from the three or four battered "how-to" books you've got lying around under the sofa; from the cluck-clucking counsel of parents and strangers; and from the murky memories of your own fucked-up (or not-so-fucked-up) childhood. In his forthcoming memoir, "Family Man," Calvin Trillin gets to the heart of the matter: "Your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary." When it comes to bringing up babies -- like taste in architecture or religion, pop music or neckties -- every generation likes to feel more enlightened than the one that preceded it. In 1998, I sometimes feel so enlightened that I'd like to strangle somebody. (Maybe William Bennett.) Like everyone else these days, parents are drowning in information, from a rainbow-hued assortment of child-care texts to magazines like Hip Mama and Web sites like this one. Wisdom, in William James' formulation, is learning what to overlook. If that is true, my wife and I have lost as much brain matter as we have sleep. Given the current flood of input about our offspring, it's just about impossible to imagine what it was like to raise kids in 1946, the year the first edition of Benjamin Spock's "Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" appeared. Thomas Maier, in his comprehensive new biography of Spock, does a fine, chilling job of reminding us. Among the most venerated pre-Spock child-care books was John B. Watson's "Psychological Care of Infant and Child," which was treated as gospel at many hospitals -- including the one where Spock began work as a pediatrician. To label Watson's pronouncements cringe-inducing is to understate pretty severely. "Never hug or kiss [your children], never let them sit in your lap," Watson instructed, lest they drown in "Mother Love." He continued: "If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning." Watson further argued that children should be prevented from thumb-sucking -- even if that meant lashing their tiny wrists to the bedposts. This was pediatrics with an injection of Cotton Mather. Given Watson's strictures, it's easy to see why Dr. Spock and his book were so warmly received. Spock pushed aside the dubious "science" in earlier child-rearing texts and gave parents simple, intuitive (and highly Freudian) advice in folksy, everyday language. His most famous bit of advice -- "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." -- rained down on America's postwar suburbs like a benediction. More than 50 years after he composed those two sentences, there's still something moving about them. Without getting all gushy about it, Spock's words nearly made this new father weep with gratitude and relief, particularly after I'd tried to memorize the fine print in a handful of other texts. Benjamin McLane Spock died last week at the ripe old age of 94, and it's hard to argue with his new biographer when he writes that Spock "reflected as much of America in the twentieth century as any individual." His was a remarkable life, by any measure. The product of stoic New England parents, Spock went to Yale and won a gold medal in rowing at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. In the late 1940s and throughout the '50s, his books and public appearances made him one of the most venerated men in America. (His "Baby and Child Care" has sold almost 50 million copies and is the biggest-selling book in the U.S. after the Bible.) In 1960, he helped push John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign over the top, and then Lyndon Johnson's in 1964. (In his book "The Making of the President -- 1964," Theodore H. White listed the big names who backed LBJ before noting that "the crusher was Dr. Benjamin Spock -- baby-book Spock.") N E X T+P A G E: Pediatrics is politics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B O O K+I N F O R M A T I O N:
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