Doctor’s Advice on Raising Healthy Children

BENJAMIN SPOCK, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946)

The postwar domestic ideology lavished attention on the family and the healthy rearing of children. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best-selling book for parents tapped an audience of nervous mothers who sought the opinion of experts on such things as feeding habits, toilet training, and discipline. Trained as a pediatrician, Spock offered advice to mothers that contradicted the conventional wisdom practiced by earlier generations of parents.

Trust Yourself

You know more than you think you do. Soon you’re going to have a baby. Maybe you have him already. You’re happy and excited, but, if you haven’t had much experience, you wonder whether you are going to know how to do a good job. Lately you have been listening more carefully to your friends and relatives when they talked about bringing up a child. You’ve begun to read articles by experts in the magazines and newspapers. After the baby is born, the doctor and nurses will begin to give you instructions, too. Sometimes it sounds like a very complicated business. You find out all the vitamins a baby needs and all the inoculations. One mother tells you you must use the black kind of nipples, another says the yellow. You hear that a baby must be handled as little as possible, and that a baby must be cuddled plenty; that spinach is the most valuable vegetable, that spinach is a worthless vegetable; that fairy tales make children nervous, and that fairy tales are a wholesome outlet.

Don’t take too seriously all that the neighbors say. Don’t be overawed by what the experts say. Don’t be afraid to trust your own common sense. Bringing up your child won’t be a complicated job if you take it easy, trust your own instincts, and follow the directions that your doctor gives you. We know for a fact that the natural loving care that kindly parents give to their children is a hundred times more valuable than their knowing how to pin a diaper on just right, or making a formula expertly. Every time you pick your baby up, even if you do it a little awkwardly at first, every time you change him, bathe him, feed him, smile at him, he’s getting a feeling that he belongs to you and that you belong to him. Nobody else in the world, no matter how skillful, can give that to him.

It may surprise you to hear that the more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all. Furthermore, all parents do their best job when they have a natural, easy confidence in themselves. Better to make a few mistakes from being natural than to do everything letter-perfect out of a feeling of worry.…

The blue feeling. It’s possible that you will find yourself feeling discouraged for a while when you first begin taking care of your baby. It’s a fairly common feeling, especially with the first. You may not be able to put your finger on anything that is definitely wrong. You just weep easily. Or you may feel very badly about certain things. One woman whose baby cries quite a bit feels sure that he has a real disease; another that her husband has become strange and distant; another that she has lost all her looks.

A feeling of depression may come on a few days after the baby is born or not till several weeks later. The commonest time is when a mother comes home from the hospital, where she has been waited on hand and foot, and abruptly takes over the full care of baby and household. It isn’t just the work that gets her down. She may even have someone to do all the work, for the time being. It’s the feeling of being responsible for the whole household again, plus the entirely new responsibility of the baby’s care and safety. Then there are all the physical and glandular changes at the time of the birth, which probably upset the spirits to some degree.

The majority of mothers don’t get enough discouraged in this period to ever call it depression. You may think it is a mistake to bring up unpleasant things that may never happen. The reason I mention it is that several mothers have told me afterwards, “I’m sure I wouldn’t have been so depressed or discouraged if I had known how common this feeling is. Why, I thought that my whole outlook on life had changed for good and all.” You can face a thing much better if you know that a lot of other people have gone through it too, and if you know that it’s just temporary.

The chance that you may feel easily discouraged is one reason for getting together all the baby’s equipment and arranging the whole household for his care before he is born. It is also a reason to consider getting someone to help you in the early weeks.

If you begin to feel at all depressed, try to get some relief from the constant care of the baby in the first month or two, especially if he cries a great deal. Go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get yourself a new hat or dress. Visit a good friend occasionally. Take the baby along if you can’t find anyone to stay with him. Or get your old friends to come and see you. All of these are tonics. If you are depressed, you may not feel like doing these things. But if you make yourself, you will feel a lot better. And that’s important for the baby and your husband as well as yourself. (The rare mother who becomes deeply depressed should have the help of a psychiatrist without delay.)

As for a mother’s feeling, when she’s blue, that her husband seems different, far away, there are two sides to it. On the one hand, anyone who is depressed feels that other people are less friendly and affectionate. But on the other hand, it’s natural for a father, being human, to feel “put out” when his wife and the rest of the household are completely wrapped up in the baby. So it’s a sort of vicious circle. The mother (as if she didn’t have enough to do already!) has to remember to pay some attention to her husband. And she should give him every chance to share the care of the baby. …

Enjoy Your Baby

He isn’t a schemer. He needs loving. You’d think from all you hear about babies demanding attention that they come into the world determined to get their parents under their thumbs by hook or by crook. This is not true at all. Your baby is born to be a reasonable, friendly human being. If you treat him nicely, he won’t take advantage of you. Don’t be afraid to love him or respond to his needs. Every baby needs to be smiled at, talked to, played with, fondled — gently and lovingly — just as much as he needs vitamins and calories, and the baby who doesn’t get any loving will grow up cold and unresponsive. When he cries it’s for a good reason — maybe it’s hunger, or wetness, or indigestion, or just because he’s on edge and needs soothing. His cry is there to call you. The uneasy feeling you have when you hear him cry, the feeling that you want to comfort him, is meant to be part of your nature, too. A little gentle rocking may actually be good for him.…

He doesn’t have to be sternly trained. You may hear people say that you have to get your baby strictly regulated in his feeding, sleeping, bowel movements, and other habits — but don’t believe this either. In the first place, you can’t get a baby regulated beyond a certain point, no matter how hard you try. In the second place, you are more apt, in the long run, to make him balky and disagreeable when you go at his training too hard. Everyone wants his child to turn out to be healthy in his habits and easy to live with. But each child wants, himself, to eat at sensible hours, and later to learn good table manners. His bowels (as long as the movements don’t become too hard) will move according to their own healthy pattern, which may or may not be regular; and when he is much older and wiser, you can show him where to sit to move them. He will develop his own pattern of sleep, according to his own needs. In all these habits he will fit into the family’s way of doing things sooner or later without much effort on your part.

The same thing goes, later on, for discipline, good behavior, and pleasant manners. You can’t drill these into a child from the outside in a hundred years. The desire to get along with other people happily and considerately develops within him as part of the unfolding of his nature, provided he grows up with loving, self-respecting parents.

What I am saying in different ways is that you don’t have to be grimly determined, in order to bring up a healthy, agreeable, successful child. It’s the parents who have a natural self-confidence in themselves and a comfortable, affectionate attitude toward their children who get the best results — and with the least effort.…

He isn’t frail. “I’m so afraid I’ll hurt him if I don’t handle him right,” a mother often says about her first baby. You don’t have to worry, you have a pretty tough baby. There are many ways to hold him. If his head drops backward by mistake it won’t hurt him. The open spot in his skull (the fontanel) is covered by a tough membrane like canvas that isn’t easily injured. The system to control his body temperature is working quite well by the time he weighs 7 pounds if he’s covered halfway sensibly. He has a good resistance to most germs. During a family cold epidemic he’s apt to have it the mildest of all. If he gets his head tangled in anything he has a strong instinct to struggle and yell. If he’s not getting enough to eat, he will probably cry for more. If the light is too strong for his eyes, he’ll blink and fuss. (You can take his picture with a flash bulb, even if it does make him jump.) He knows how much sleep he needs and takes it. He can care for himself pretty well for a person who can’t say a word, can’t control his arms and legs, and knows nothing about the world.

Enjoy him as he is — that’s how he’ll grow up best. Every baby’s face is different from every other’s. In the same way every baby’s pattern of development is different. One may be very advanced in his general bodily strength and coordination, an early sitter, stander, walker — a sort of infant athlete. And yet he may be slow in doing careful, skillful things with his fingers, in talking. Even a baby who is an athlete in rolling over, standing, and creeping may turn out to be slow to learn to walk. A baby who’s advanced in his physical activities may be very slow in his teething and vice versa. A child who turns out later to be smart in his schoolwork may have been so slow in beginning to talk that his parents were afraid for a while that he was dull; and a child who has just an ordinary amount of brains is sometimes a very early talker.

I am purposely picking out examples of children with mixed rates of development to give you an idea of what a jumble of different qualities and patterns of growth each individual person is composed.

One baby is born to be big-boned and square and chunky, while another will always be small-boned and delicate. One individual really seems to be born to be fat. If he loses weight during an illness, he gains it back promptly afterwards. The troubles that he has in the world never take away his appetite. The opposite kind of individual stays on the thin side, even when he has the most nourishing food to eat, even though life is running smoothly for him.

Love and enjoy your child for what he is, for what he looks like, for what he does, and forget about the qualities that he doesn’t have. I don’t give you this advice just for sentimental reasons. There’s a very important practical point here. The child who is appreciated for what he is, even if he is homely, or clumsy, or slow, will grow up with confidence in himself, happy. He will have a spirit that will make the best of all the capacities that he has, and of all the opportunities that come his way. He will make light of any handicaps. But the child who has never been quite accepted by his parents, who has always felt that he was not quite right, grows up lacking confidence. He’ll never be able to make full use of what brains, what skills, what physical attractiveness he has. If he starts life with a handicap, physical or mental, it will be multiplied tenfold by the time he is grown up.

Now, of course, once in a great while a baby seems to be generally slow in his development, doesn’t hold his head up, or respond to people, or show an interest in his surroundings, at an age when other babies are doing these things. Should a parent be philosophical about this and try to forget it? That would be carrying it too far. One of these babies is just born to be that way and there’s no magic way to change him; but another may have a deficiency disease which can and should be treated early. That’s a reason for having a doctor check a baby regularly.

Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), 3–4, 16–17, 19–22.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS