Dr. Spock On Parenting: Sensible, Reassuring Advice for Today's Parent - Softcover

Dr. Benjamin Spock was the most trusted and most famous pediatrician worldwide; his reassuring and commonsense advice shaped parenting practices for half a century. The author of eleven books, he was a political activist for causes that vitally affect children: disarmament, day care, schooling, housing, and medical care for all. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care has been translated into thirty-nine languages and has sold more than fifty million copies worldwide since its first publication in 1946. Please visit DrSpock.com for more information.

Chapter One: Anxieties in Our Lives

CAN WE EASE OUR TENSIONS?

TO WORK OUTSIDE OR NOT

LATE PARENTING

CAN YOU RAISE SUPERKIDS?

ABDUCTORS AND MOLESTERS

Can We Ease Our Tensions?

I believe ours is the most stressful country in the world, though this doesn't need to be. We aren't more conscious of our distress because a majority of us are still financially more comfortable than the people of other countries, and this material wealth anesthetizes us.

Why are we so tense? To begin with, we've lost sources of security and comfort that our ancestors relied on up to a few generations ago. We aren't even aware of what we've lost.

Back when so much in the universe was considered mysterious and known only to God, a far greater number of us had a strong sense of having been created in his or her image and of being guided every hour of the day by God's concern. Today, the sciences have appeared to take over much of the authority that was formerly God's, yet they are too impersonal to serve as guides; worse, they have fragmented and demoted us into feeling that we are merely biological and psychological mechanisms, only a little more complex than other animals, adapting to various sociological backgrounds. So we have lost much of our sense of dignity as individuals. We don't have souls anymore.

People used to live with or close to their relatives, in the extended family. Young couples could get prompt help with child care, marital difficulties, financial crises, illnesses; sitters were always at hand. This added up to a great emotional security but we don't know enough to miss it. In fact we pity the couple who takes in a grandparent: "The poor Jenkinses, they have to have her mother living with them."

Most Americans once lived in small, tight-knit communities where they were well known and could count on caring neighbors. They felt a corresponding obligation to help others and to participate in local affairs. Nowadays young couples hurry to large cities for better jobs, where they can depend only on themselves and feel isolated. They are apt to move often. It's a rootless existence; we take this for granted, but it surely takes its toll.

Mothers as well as fathers take outside jobs in 50 percent of families with preschool children. Whatever the reason -- financial or emotional -- they have every right to jobs and careers. Unfortunately, however, in this country we haven't solved the problem of providing high-quality day care. Good day care must be subsidized by government or industry for families with modest incomes, but our government says it can't afford to help. So children are being neglected in large numbers and will show the effects in their characters for life.

The tensions of our society must contribute to our high divorce rate, which has doubled in the last fifteen years. Then divorce itself creates new symptoms of distress -- in all the children and in both parents -- for at least two years. Then come the distresses of the stepfamily, which may last for many years and can't be imagined until experienced, as I found out myself. Currently there are nearly as many stepfamilies as nonstepfamilies in the United States. For the first time, original nuclear families will be the minority.

Factors contributing to divorce are briefness of acquaintance before marriage and marriage at an early age. I suspect another factor is that very many American youths have been favored with all the possessions and privileges their parents could possibly afford, including, in some families I've known, a car for the sixteenth birthday. This is far beyond what youths expect in other industrial nations. Money has been relatively easy to earn. Most high schools and universities have not been academically difficult compared to those in other countries. In other words, many youths have been able to get most of what they wanted without great effort. So they expect marriage to provide all imaginable pleasures and satisfactions. They haven't realized -- and their parents haven't told them -- that marriage is like a garden, which must be constantly cultivated to survive, let alone improve.

Our species by nature gets great satisfaction, in non-industrial societies, from creating well-made and beautiful objects, whether for our own everyday use -- pots, containers, implements, clothing, ornaments -- or for sale. But the assembly line approach -- in factories and offices -- although more efficient and profitable, has robbed millions of any satisfaction in their job except for the money earned. Industrial workers in Europe as well as in the United States have complained increasingly of the boredom and tension of doing meaningless work.

Our society is ferociously competitive in spirit. Children are compared with each other, in the family and in school, to spur them to greater effort. Some parents sign them up for different after-school lessons every afternoon of the week -- music, dance, athletics -- or send them to specialty camps to learn computing or tennis or soccer. In sports there is diminishing emphasis on fun, from Little League to university, and more on perfection and winning.

A ludicrous example of excessive competitiveness is the effort to make "superkids" by teaching children to recognize Beethoven's picture on flash cards at one year, or to read at the age of two, though no one has shown that such precocious skills have any beneficial effects whatsoever. (At least we haven't yet reached the degree of pressure on children that exists in Japan, where a shocking and increasing number of elementary school children commit suicide because they fear their grades will not satisfy their parents.)

In the adult years, too, the most successful executives often neglect their children and spouses in their race to get to the top and stay there.

Part of the problem in America is that our society is so exclusively materialistic. All societies have to be practical, but in most parts of the world the materialism is balanced by compelling spiritual beliefs such as the duty to serve God (as in Iran), or to serve the family even at the sacrifice of personal desires (as in certain European countries), or to serve the nation (as in Israel).

The rate of suicide in teenagers in America has quadrupled in the past twenty years. The main reason, I believe, is that youths don't have strong enough beliefs to sustain them through those stressful, bewildering years.

Our country is the most violent in the world in murders within the family, rape, wife abuse, and child abuse. Domestic violence is both an expression and a cause of the seething tensions in many of our families. Ours has always been a rough society, slipping easily into brutality, as in our treatment of Native Americans, slaves, and each new wave of immigrants. Now brutality on television and in movies is multiplying the violence. For it has been proved scientifically that each time a child or adult watches violence it desensitizes and brutalizes to at least a slight degree. Yet it's estimated that the average American child has watched eighteen thousand murders before the age of eighteen. So we are creating insensitive, violent people by the hundreds of thousands. It's not that a child brought up by kind parents will be turned into a thug. But everyone is being edged in that direction to a greater or lesser degree.

We have other serious sources of anxiety that should be self-evident. Unlike Canada and most European countries, we lack universal health care of high quality, paid out of social security or other taxes. Much of our housing is decrepit, and only the well-to-do can afford to pay for new, good housing today. There is a gross lack of recreational facilities for those in modest circumstances. Only a bare beginning has been made in overcoming the social cancer of discrimination against minorities and women.

I didn't assemble this list of stresses and horrors to depress or paralyze you. I believe that we can solve our problems

provided we first recognize them. My solutions come under two main headings: child rearing and political activity.

A DIFFERENT CHILD REARING

I think we should bring up our children with much less pressure to compete and get ahead: no comparing one child with another, at home or in school; no grades. Let athletics be primarily for fun and let them be organized by children and youths themselves.

Instead of raising our children with the chief aim of getting ahead, I think we should inspire them with the ideals of helpfulness, cooperation, kindliness, and love. These don't need to be preached with solemnity. The parents' example is the most effective means. Besides, human beings who've been raised with plenty of love love to be helpful to others, and it makes children feel good and grown up.

By two years children want to set the table. They should be allowed to set out the silver, which can't be harmed, complimented for their helpfulness, and spurred on occasionally by promises that they will be able to set the plates someday. However, when they forget to be helpful, we should squelch the impulse to scold. They can be reminded politely of how much you need their help, as you would remind a good friend who's staying with you. (In day-care centers the staff count on the children to put things away and to help serve and clean up, month after month.) Teenagers can be encouraged or expected to do volunteer work in hospitals or to tutor younger children.

There should be no grades in school. (I taught in a medical school that had very successfully abolished grades.) Grades pit each student against the others. They mislead students and teachers into thinking that learning comes from memorizing the teacher's words. But usable learning, the purpose of which should be to prepare the individual to contribute maximally as worker, citizen, and family member, comes from doing, thinking, feeling, experimenting, taking responsibility and initiative, solving problems, creating. The teacher provides the environment and the materials and calls attention to what is happening. The students do the rest.

I hope American parents can outgrow the conviction, which a majority have, that physical punishment is necessary to bring up well-behaved children. Certainly almost all parents have had an impulse to strike when, for instance, a child deliberately handles and breaks the parent's precious possession. But there are parts of the world where it has never occurred to any adult to strike a child. I have known personally or professionally dozens of families in which the parents never lifted a hand -- or otherwise punished or humiliated their children -- and yet the children were ideally cooperative and polite. Children are eager to be ever more grown up and responsible.

When an effective foreman or supervisor wants to correct a worker, he doesn't haul off and swat him on the behind or slap his face. He calls him into his office and explains how he wants the job done; in most cases the worker tries to do it better. It's just the same with children when they are treated with respect.

There are several things mistaken, I think, with physical punishment. It teaches that might makes right. It helps turn some children into bullies. And, to the degree that it makes a child behave, he behaves because he's afraid of being hurt. Much better for him to behave because he loves his parents and wants to please them and grow up to be like them.

I feel strongly that children should not be permitted to watch violence on television or in movies, whether in cartoons or with live actors. Just say, with conviction, "There is too much killing and hurting in the world!"

With similar words I'd decline to give a child guns or other military equipment, though I wouldn't run after him if he used a stick for a gun, to keep up with his pals.

POLITICALLY ACTIVE PARENTS

How are we to get federal subsidies for the adequate day care that so many millions of young parents and their children are now doing without? How will we get better elementary and high schools, with smaller classes and better-trained teachers, especially for the children in deprived areas? (They need inspiring schools most, in order to catch up with the children from advantaged backgrounds.) How will we get universal, high-quality health care for everyone? How will we get decent housing and recreation facilities for all our families? Not by wringing our hands. The solution can come only by greater political activity of our people. At present only half of us bother to vote. And many of those who do vote seem to do so not on the basis of the issues, but on personality preferences. (Sixty to seventy percent want disarmament but they elected and reelected Nixon and Reagan, openly dedicated to the arms race.)

Americans have shown that they will barrage with letters and telegrams their officials in Washington in opposition to a proposed tax or to a cut in social security for retired people. Yet few will be stirred to political activity in favor of disarmament. Is it that taxes and social security seem like citizens' issues but that armament is the government's business, too overwhelming or too technical for ordinary people? Political activity -- even letter writing and demonstrating -- seems inappropriate to millions of Americans. I've heard them dismiss all politics as dirty business though they speak proudly of our democracy. I've heard fathers say to their sons, "Never mind politics. Your job is to get ahead." People have criticized me for seeming to step out of my professional role to become undignifiedly political. I'd say it was belated realization that day care, good schools, health insurance, and nuclear disarmament are even more important aspects of pediatrics than measles vaccine or vitamin D.

Conservatives say that we can't afford to meet our social needs. But European nations, not nearly as well-off as ours, are doing more for their people and especially for their children. The main problem of course is that our government is spending trillions of dollars for additional fiendish arms in the vain hope that it will add to our national security. We must take control of the country away from the arms makers.

We must vote and vote discriminately. When incumbents seem hopeless, we can work in the nominating campaigns of candidates who share our views. After our officials are installed, we must keep track of their votes and keep after them. Letter writing and telegraphing are not namby-pamby; they are effective in impressing the president and the Congress with how people are feeling. Officials calculate that for every letter received there are thousands of nonwriters with the same urgent opinion. Don't worry about the wording. You only need to be clear about which side you're on.

You don't have to go to Washington to lobby your senators and representatives. Find out from their in-state offices when they will next visit and make an appointment for your committee. Give it an impressive name and include at least twenty earnest members. Don't go alone; they can dismiss you as just a nut.

You can attend big demonstrations in Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Or you can organize a small local demonstration, with signs, in front of your federal building, post office, or official's office. If you've tried all the proper approaches and feel desperate because you are getting nowhere, you may want to think of nonviolent civil disobedience. It attracts much more media attention. It's wise to enlist at least one courageous clergyman, to reassure yourselves that your cause is just and to impress the police. It is necessary to recruit a pub...