Welcome to Spock Talk! It’s episode 5 and I finally got the title right. For anyone that noticed I’ve been saying it backwards! Spock Talk, not Talk Spock.

This is the podcast that explores:

• What’s the deal with Dr. Benjamin Spock?
• How did Baby and Child Care become the preeminent parenting guide of the 20th century?
• Who gets to tell parents how to parent?

I’m Deborah

And I’m Katie

We’re talking Spock because we want to understand what it is about Dr. Spock’s work that endures. Why is the Spock brand around, twenty-five years after Dr. Spock died?

But first, listeners, we want to hear from you! Let us know your favorite parenting advice book or website. Leave it in a review on Apple Podcasts! We’ll compile a list and read it in a future episode.

Last episode we covered how psychology, Freud, and psychoanalysis influenced Spock’s work, which, in turn, influenced American culture. 

In this episode, we are covering the sexism in Spock’s written works, gender roles, pronouns, domestic labor, and mom guilt.

On the surface level, the original Baby and Child Care was sexist. Spock made it clear that mothers were primarily responsible for raising children (Maier, p. 141). 

When I read the early editions, I couldn’t help but notice that, whenever there was an example of how NOT to do something, Spock always made an example out of a woman. It’s hard to find an example of a father or adult man doing anything wrong in the early editions of Baby and Child Care.

But is it hard to find an example of a father or adult man doing anything in the early editions of Baby and Child Care?

Let me give you some samples from the text: In the 1957 edition, in a section titled “Changes in Diet and Schedule,” Spock didn’t land on one age, or age range, for when to add solid foods to a baby’s diet. He said, basically, check with your doctor. who will have a good understanding of the family’s history of any allergies, the baby’s digestive system and growth rate.

But then Spock ended the section with pure snark, writing, “A big factor in giving solids earlier has been the eagerness of mothers who don’t want their baby to be one day later than the baby up the street. They put strong pressure on doctors [emphasis mine]” (p. 127). 

this sounds personal, not universal. I’m sure it becomes draining on doctors to answer the same questions over and over again from first time moms. But let’s stop and consider two factors. 1) Whether or not a baby is hitting developmental milestones on time may be a question doctors get asked a lot, and the answer might usually be “yes, don’t worry so much.” But when a woman’s life purpose is childrearing, there is an entire universe of shame and blame centered on achieving or not achieving these milestones. These outcomes are not trivial to her life. 2) This is the system you’ve created. In order to keep women in their place, you need them to be invested in things like making sure the Jones baby doesn’t graduate to solids first. 

In a passage on “Spoiling”, subheading “The spoiled baby who vomits,” Spock suggested that mothers were at fault for encouraging angry vomiting by their babies. Because the mothers acted upset, looked anxious, and rushed to clean up. A mother who acted too sympathetic encouraged this rage vomiting. And Spock’s solution was for the mother to “harden her heart to the vomiting if her baby is using it to bully her.” (p. 188).

This is seriously the exact same advice I’ve gotten for my household pets. Never let them see you clean up their rage poop or they will know they’ve won.

Spock disparaged overbearing mothers who made their babies constipated, overprotective mothers who made their children timid and fearful, mothers who were overly concerned with appearances who wouldn’t let babies have worn out lovies, or wouldn’t let babies out of their playpens because they’d make a mess. And In a very weirdly specific anecdote, he criticized mothers who talked in baby talk for too long because they adored their daughters’ corkscrew curls. (p. 238) 

I know there are a lot of people with strong views on baby talk, but when confronted with a particularly cute baby, it is hard to resist. And when confronted with a particularly cute baby with adorable corkscrew curls? Impossible.

There are sooooo many examples. We could keep going, but let’s move on to some positives. Kind of.

Spock encouraged fathers to be involved. BUT he put the onus of paternal involvement on the mother, writing that it’s the wife’s job to hand off certain tasks or situations to the husband, and it’s up to her to make the father look good. (Maier, p. 204).

Two words. Mental Load. Yes, fathers should be involved, but only in the tasks their wives have preplanned and set out for them. This remains a huge issue in parenting today, even in couples that are committed to equal co-parenting!

Time is a flat loop!

Spock was the first parenting expert to address the baby blues and postpartum depression in print, which is super important! 

I am reserving judgment. I have a feeling he’ll address it but still somehow make it the woman’s fault. I need to hear more.

It’s not too bad, he basically says, this is normal, it’s both physical and mental, he gives some suggestions for self-care, if it’s really bad, see a psychiatrist. BUT ends on about how mothers of new babies might be frustrated if the fathers seem indifferent to their baby blues. Writing, quote “The mother (as if she didn’t have enough to do already!) has to remember to PAY SOME ATTENTION TO HER HUSBAND.” (14-15)

There it is!

Spock’s on breastfeeding was surprisingly chill. In the 1957 edition he wrote, “think of breast feeding not as a test of your devotion to the baby…but simply as a good thing if you really enjoy it and it works, but no cause for despair if not” (p. 67-68).

That’s so reasonable!

So reasonable! Can you situate Spock at all in the bottle vs. breast timeline? The first edition of his book came out when formula was very popular, right? So it makes sense that he wouldn’t be too strident when it came to breastfeeding.

Yeah, one paper I read, makes a point to tally up the number of pages devoted to breastfeeding (few) and number of pages devoted to formula feeding (lots), and that quantitative difference worked to encourage formula feeding over breastfeeding. 

Which, if you’re looking at this in a sort of Marxist way, which I am, Baby and Infant Care dresses up this formula feeding recommendation in scientific credibility and middle-class social norms were changing about bottle feeding vs. nursing. (Atkinson, p. 131). More mothers are using formula, the formula companies are making more money, later on there are more workers available because formula makes it so anyone can feed the baby with a bottle. By a certain point in the later 20th century, breastfeeding is a weird thing to do.

Which was very different from our experiences as new mothers, when, if you didn’t breastfeed, you were, like, practically abusing your baby. Which, is probably why I have some affinity for the casual way that Spock doesn’t judge mothers for nursing or not nursing.

Overall, the content he wrote and the way he wrote does dignify the work of raising children. Because he recognizes that it’s important (Maier, p. 204).

I think of the old black and white sitcoms Leave it to Beaver and Donna Reed, you know, I watched those on Nick at Nite when I was a kid, and that was the scene in Spock’s first three editions of Baby and Child Care. The father was supportive to the mother but didn’t take an active role in caregiving, while the mother had no role except for caregiving (Dobris, p. 45).

This is not really Spock’s fault, but the book does become wildly influential so, while it was  reflective of the era, it also reinforced the sexist notion that men and women should occupy totally different spheres with very little overlap of the Venn diagram.

 I’m never anxious to give anyone a pass for upholding the patriarchy, but Spock’s expertise came from treating middle class white women. These were the family dynamics he was most often exposed to, so he reflected those back to his readers. And it’s not as if nothing has changed; obviously the 10th edition isn’t like this. So when and how did the language evolve?

By the time Baby and Child Care was in its 4th edition, in 1976, it was regarded as a “landmark for feminism” (Maier, p. 377). Changes included:

• Infants were no longer referred to as “he / him” and instead referred to as “the baby,” “the child,” “them,” or the phrase, “supposing the baby is a girl.”
• Spock cautioned parents not to fall into sex stereotypes, like complimenting the appearance of girls and the achievements of boys 

This seems like such a leap forward, but I suppose we are in peak “Free to be you and me” era. Massive strides are being made in second wave feminist causes.

• The 4th edition addressed the unfairness of girls being expected to do housework while boys “frolic outdoors”
• Spock wrote, “‘Both parents have an equal right to a career if they want one, and an equal obligation to share in the care of their children’” (Maier, p. 377).

Let’s listen to an audio clip of Dr. Benjamin Spock speaking about revising the sexist language in Baby and Child Care:

[So I thought long and hard, and I realized ‘Sure women are discriminated against’ I’ve discriminated against women, and girls and such things, in Baby and Child Care, always referring to the child as he! And always referring to the parent as she. There’s no reason why the child in any book should always be he. In the midst of the revision of Baby and Child Care at the present time, as a technical problem, I’ve solved it mainly by changing the singular to the plural. Talk about children: they, them, theirs. Then if I have to talk about an individual child, discussing a problem, I say, 3-year-old thumb sucker, let’s say it’s a boy, and then go on to the rest.]

These changes came about because Spock was criticized by lots of feminists, like Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, and Gloria Steinem.

Even the famous “trust yourself” line was considered to be problematic because it assumed a maternal instinct, and made women who didn’t naturally feel maternal to feel like failures. (Talbot, p. 20-21)

In 1970, Spock published a book titled Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior. Before the FemLib movement. Can I call it the FemLib movement?

This is an extremely bad book. He showed a draft to a journalist friend who advised him not to publish it! And it contained some pretty objectionable stuff about how girls should prepare for motherhood, not careers, based on a dumb Freudian idea about inherent sex differences.

Let me read you a selection from the Table of Contents:

Section II, Problems of Sex and Sex Role: The Sexes Are Really Different. Women’s Rivalry with Men. The Causes of Passivity and Domesticity in Men. Fulfillment and Jobs for Women. Marital Problems that Begin in Childhood.

I didn’t read the book. Because I read that, in 1974, Spock recanted and apologized for Decent and Indecent and other sexism. In fact, He wrote, that girls and boys should all be brought up to think they are capable of child-rearing. In another book titled Raising Children in a Difficult Time. 

By “difficult time” did he mean “this time when women are demanding some measure of equality”? Difficult time for who, doctor?

The book was a compilation of his Redbook columns. By “difficult time” I think he meant poverty, racism, materialism, war, the volatile 1960s. I read a review of Raising Children in a Difficult Time that called it “homiletic and tedious”. And criticized Spock for being very out of touch.

There is something I want to highlight that gets lost in this gender role controversy, and who gets to work outside the home, and what I think the second wave feminists got wrong about Spock.

Ann Hubert, author of the book Raising America, wrote that Spock was trying to enforce the role of women as caregivers just when “economic and cultural pressures were pushing the opposite way,” for women to leave the home and have careers. (Hubert, p. 269). 

This is speculative and possibly revisionist, but I don’t 100% agree with this analysis of Spock’s treatment of women. On the one hand, sure, he wrote that women should be on the home front, doing the bulk of the child care. The feminist critique, at the time, ignored that Spock dignified domestic labor by proposing compensation for it. 

It’s such a second-wavey white woman notion that working outside of the home, in the marketplace, earning wages, feeding the capitalism machine, is, like, more important than unpaid domestic work. As our generation knows, any gains that white women made in the workforce were often on the backs of undercompensated, underappreciated Black and Brown women who were low-paid nannies, daycare workers, restaurant workers, and housecleaners.

Second wave feminism did not consider that maybe insisting on dual incomes would be hard on families because capitalism’s response to women entering the workforce and forgoing the stay-at-home-mother role would be to just raise the cost of living so that it wasn’t a choice, for most families anymore. 

Spock made a radical suggestion that the government “pay an allowance to all mothers of young children rather than forcing them to work to pay their bills”. Along the lines of how early childhood education advocates make the case for universal preschool, he thought that this would be a good investment in producing “useful, well-adjusted citizens” (Maier p. 141)

Later, in his “Spock recants” New York Times editorial, he wrote about that dreamy policy in a more gender-neutral way, “Some day I hope that the government will pay a salary to a parent who stays at home to care for children, and that his or her seniority in the career position will be maintained.”

And if the second wave feminists had championed a one breadwinner in the family model and if there were second wave feminist men who had stayed home with the kids and dignified the work of keeping a household running and raising children. Well. We would live in an entirely different world, wouldn’t we?

we’re just a couple of stay-at-home moms. What do we know? Can you imagine? Instead of the rare stay at home dad getting constant praise for his brave sacrifices and willingness to “help mom out,” we get a general acceptance that domestic work is valuable work no matter who does it? Such a dream. Nowadays, people bandy about figures, saying “if stay at home moms were paid for their work, they’d be earning X amount,” but that tepid recognition still never goes beyond lip service. 

And to bring my own personal grudge into it, if being a stay-at-home parent were less stigmatized, it might be easier to get back into the workforce after one’s children are in school full time. I can’t even say the number of jobs I’ve applied to, and been rejected for, because of the gap I have on my resume.

And speaking of stay-at-home moms. I listened to a recording of a 1984 call-in radio show with Spock and there was a question about working mothers and Spock said that he never meant to disparage mothers for working, he was trying to encourage parents to prioritize the child by either one parent--the mom or dad--staying home, or both parents arranging their schedules so the child could be home until around age 3, at which point he thought kids benefited from a nursery school situation.

AND THEN he went on to talk about the horrors of baby farms where, maybe 2 women were trying to tend to 20 babies, and how that was a terrible situation, and, like, have you ever heard of a baby farm like that before?

 I’ve never heard of “baby farms,” at least not in the modern era, but childcare is hard to come by and extremely expensive, and unlicensed childcare facilities do exist, and I’m sure people are driven to them out of necessity. I can’t tell you the number of stay at home moms I know who do not work simply because the entirety of their paycheck would have been devoted to childcare. If they truly needed that second paycheck to pay rent or meet other basic needs, what alternative is there other than turning to a less expensive option that operates outside the rules?

Thinking back to our first episode, and how the early 1900s childcare advice was pretty tough and the public enjoyed Spock’s somewhat reactionary advice. I wondered what Spock was reacting to?

A gruesome library database search turns up articles about baby farms in Victorian England, and unwanted infants and infanticide.

But I think Spock was referring to a system of daycare in the United States in the 1800s. It was an informal child-care network of single mothers, poor women, who boarded infants and stayed home doing childcare, while other women went to work for a living. Not as a choice. As survival.

If I can get permission from Minnesota Public Radio to use 26 seconds of that radio interview, I will paste it in here. 

If not, pretend I have a deep voice and a New England Brahmin accent:

It's especially important when the baby is in the first year or two that there not be too many babies that the old-fashioned Arrangement where a lot of working mothers left their babies and what got to be called Baby Farms where one woman or two women were trying to take care of 20 babies that that is very bad babies can't grow up properly with that dilute a care.

This helps to explain Spock’s encouragement of stay-at-home parents, I think?. If this type of system is your frame of reference, or worst-case scenario, of course your personal pendulum is going to swing wildly in the opposite direction and advocate for a baby to enjoy a nice first three years of their life at home, with a loving parent, in a nurturing environment.

Of course. OF COURSE. The problem isn’t wanting that for a child. The problem is stating that only a mother can provide that.

Okay. Every time I request a new book, or do a new literature search, or open up my Spock Talk Google Drive folder, I feel a bit uneasy. Like, why am I spending so much time and energy on this bro from the 1900s? When, I could be doing literally anything else. No one ordered this podcast from us. And we are using our two wild and precious lives to dive deep into a Spock hole of masculine parenting expertise.

I mean, I’m all for a season 2 on Magda Gerber, but any influential female parenting expert would have nowhere near the name recognition that Spock has, and there’s a reason for that - one that deserves to be explored. I think the fascinating thing you’re digging up here is that yes Spock’s work was influential because he was a man in a society that privileges insights from men, but it was (and still is!) influential for so many other reasons. The increased need for parenting advice from an increasingly mobile population - a population that has only gotten more mobile over time. The medicalization of childbirth and childrearing and now the modern backlash against that. Spock was defining trends in parenting that we’re still seeing play out in our lives. Of course, if there truly were a female corollary to Dr. Benjamin Spock in reach and popularity, we wouldn’t need to do a podcast about her because we’d be spending our time enjoying gender equality, and our brains wouldn’t be filled with any pesky obsessions with the patriarchy!

I love this speculative riff on our reality, but I mean, maybe not? Women can be perpetuators of patriarchy, too. 

I wonder if, one reason why Spock’s work endured for so long, is because his book was so good at perpetuating mom guilt? I think mom guilt cuts across time and place, across generational and socioeconomic boundaries, and is generally a problem that affects, to some degree, most American female parents. 

And controversy over what’s sexist, what’s feminist, you know, getting yelled at by Gloria Steinem. This push-pull of what women should be doing - staying home with their kids, or out earning wages, it doesn’t really matter, mothers can never achieve that Goldilocks “just right” unattainable ideal. MOM GUILT SELLS! At least, mom guilt gets me to click on any internet article that suggests I might be screwing up my parenting responsibilities! 

Oh mom guilt, my constant companion. Yes, there it is whispering to me that because I spent this hour with you recording today, my children will be eating frozen veggies heated up in the microwave tonight and not organic greens from my carefully tended garden which is how we know a good mom would really do it. How will my male children learn to be nurturing if I do not expose them to the joy of gardening? Here I am, single handedly perpetuating the patriarchy by encouraging my sons to conform to stereotypical gender norms so I could selfishly record a podcast. How dare I?    

Before we wrap up, let’s go to a segment we call “New Spock, Old Spock.” In this segment we’ll take a look at early Spock advice and see what has changed since the mid-1900s.

Here is a passage from the OG Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare, first edition published in 1946. This one has a fun little dig at neurotic moms at the end!

“Conscientious parents often dread the comic strips and comic books, thinking that they ruin their children’s taste for good reading, fill their minds with morbid ideas, keep them indoors, interfere with homework, and waste good money. All these accusations have a bit of truth in them. But when children show a universal craving for something, whether it’s comics or candy or jazz, we’ve got to assume that it has a positive, constructive value for them. It may be wise to try to give them what they want in a better form, but it does no good for us to cluck like nervous hens.” (Spock, p. 320)

What do later editions say about comics? Or jazz? Or nervous hens?

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spock Talk! Please subscribe so you are sure to get our next episode, in which we’ll talk about the women in Dr. Benjamin Spock’s personal life. It’s the stuff of gossip columns and tabloids and celebrity magazines. Do not miss it!

See this episode’s show notes for our references.

If you like what you’re hearing, give us a like or a share on social media! Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! Listen to our other podcast, It’s My Screen Time Too where we review TV shows and movies made for kids.

Remember, listeners, we want to hear from you! Let us know your favorite parenting advice book or website. Leave it in a review on Apple Podcasts! We’ll compile a list and read it in a future episode.

Special thanks to the WNYC Archive Collections!

And Minnesota Public Radio 

We’ll see you soon, the next time we Talk Spock!