Welcome to Spock Talk! 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?

Last episode we talked about Spock’s personal finances, and in this, our last full episode about Dr. Benjamin Spock, we’re going to talk about what we’ve learned on our journey into Spock-ology.

We’re wrapping up, but this doesn’t have to be good-bye. Listeners, you can subscribe to our It’s My Screen Time Too podcast where we review movies and TV made for kids.

The door is not entirely closed on a second season, someday, maybe. Stay subscribed to our feed and you’ll get to hear about what we’re up to, our recommendations for other independent podcasts, maybe even some bonus New Spock / Old Spock episodes. 

Let us know what you liked best about Spock Talk - leave it in a review on Apple Podcasts. Or send an email to spocktalkpodcast@gmail.com. 

Feelings

We are going to talk about what we’ve learned through our exploration of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s life and work. But first, is it okay if we talk a little bit about our feelings?

I think Spock would support a feelings check-in, but only with our respective psychoanalysts. I don’t know that he would consider this publicly available podcast to be the appropriate venue, but we are enlightened twenty-first century women, so yes, of course let’s talk about our feelings.

I would have really liked this podcast when I was a first-time parent! I’m sad it wasn’t around when I was trying to find a good baby book, and balance the advice I got from family members with the medical advice I got from our pediatrician.

I’m also feeling a little guilty about spending SOOOOO much time on this one male authority figure. Although, anyone who has listened to even five minutes of any episode of Spock Talk knows this isn’t a MAGA exercise or a nostalgia for the twentieth century

We have to learn about the patriarchy in order to dismantle it. I think it’s crucial that women take a long, hard look at the degree to which they’ve allowed men to dictate how they live their lives, and that includes interrogating why we’re still reaching for a resource originally written by a man who in a lot of ways distanced himself very explicitly from women’s knowledge and wisdom when it came to childbirth and childrearing.

How about you, how are you feeling?

 You know I will rail against the patriarchy all day long, but I think it’s been really valuable to me to consider Spock as a whole person, influenced by his upbringing and the world he inhabited. A good reminder to take a step back and do that when we can in our everyday lives (not necessarily in the form of a 10 episode podcast series). We’re so encouraged to divide people into us or them; good or evil. It’s been a refreshing reminder that people aren’t so simple.

Speaking of feelings, let’s listen to a brief clip from Dr. Benjamin Spock taking a call from a mother during a call-in show on Minnesota Public Radio in 1984, and an exchange about how Baby and Child Care made parents feel:

If you did nothing else you made us feel that whatever we did. It was probably okay in the kid would survive and it took away a lot of the the intense anxiety. (00:27:41) Yeah. I'm So delighted you make this point because that really was what the book was written for is to reassure parents and I leaned up a backwoods not to criticize them previous books intended to take a somewhat condescending or strongly disapproving attitude. Look out stupid. If you don't do just what I say you want to ruin your kid and I knew that that doesn't help parents that it hurts them. So I I wrote it to be reassuring I'm delighted that you heard that

How it started; how it’s going

It’s the tone! The tone made it popular! Obviously, we’ve learned a lot about Dr. Benjamin Spock as we made this podcast. Let’s Guy Roz this, How Did This Get Made-style.

 I think a lot of the initial appeal was just to point at early childcare advice and laugh at how ridiculous it seems to modern audiences. While funny to us, we didn’t think that would necessarily sustain a whole show, and you just jumped right in and were pretty quick to see the potential in Spock.

Yes, it was so fun to learn that Dr. Benjamin Spock was actually a pretty interesting public figure! Super prolific author, very long and interesting life. But we didn’t want the podcast to sound like a Wikipedia bulleted list of his milestones and accomplishments. 

 I’m a big fan of a lot of conversational podcasts in which one host teaches the other host about a particular topic like You’re Wrong About or Maintenance Phase. Plus, for an extra peek behind the curtain, it just made sense to let Deborah educate me on Spock bit by bit, because she was the driving force behind the research and had all the insight.

And more time for reading stuff because my kids are older. Dividing up the life events and controversies and larger social impacts of Spock’s career has been a fun way to put together an episodic examination of Spock himself. And also how ideas and ideology around parenting and child care are produced, generally. 

Do we like Spock?

What do you think, personally, about Dr. Benjamin Spock. Do you like him?

Yes. On balance, yes. I think we have to be careful about giving people passes because they were “of their time,” but I think this is a descriptor that really works for Spock. He was able to do what he did thanks in large part to his role as an educated white male in midcentury America. His early views reflect those typical of educated white men in midcentury America, but I also think it’s clear that his thinking evolved on a variety of topics, and he wasn’t this static figure. He recognized that his thinking had to change and that it should change, so yes, I like him for that evolution. I don’t on balance feel uncomfortable about my general view of him as a kindly, avuncular cultural presence. I am still incredibly angry about his treatment of his first wife, however.

I just watched a documentary about Spock from 1995, titled “Ben Spock, Baby Doctor”. It had commentary from Mortimer Zuckerman who said, “the power of Spock and the importance of Spock is that he is at the very center of the very most momentous change in American character in the 20th century. The change from thoughts essentially conditioned by scarcity to a character that's essentially conditioned by abundance”

We’ve been hard on him, we’ve made fun of his clothes, and his privilege. We’ve pegged him as a bad parent and a neglectful spouse. But I do like him! Especially his political activism, which I find very inspiring. I find his public persona very charming. I’ve spent a ton of time reading about him, reading works by him, searching for information, thinking about him, maybe most impactfully, listening to recordings of him. In a weird parasocial way, you might say I have a bit of a history crush on him.

You know the New York Times Book Review  “By the Book” interview, where they ask an author who they’d invite to a literary dinner party, any three writers, living or dead? Dr. Benjamin Spock would definitely make my literary dinner party guest list.

When we started this project I did not think that we would really be using the Spock advice.

What, because you were already scraping the browned parts off of steaks and serving it to your children? You thought your days of dealing with milk scum were over, so he had nothing to teach you?

Honestly, I have found the vintage Baby and Child Care advice kind of helpful! I find myself explaining to my kids sometimes why I sound crabby (Spock would say, “cross”). That kind of resets the tone of our interactions, in a good way. And that’s something I picked up from Spock’s book. My kids get upset if I use my strict mom voice, so if I’m like, “because I already asked you to do something 6 times, that’s why my tone is escalating,” then they get it. And they’ll be like, “Makes sense. I was totally ignoring you.” And that’s an interaction I wasn’t having with them before I read Baby and Child Care all the way through.

Has this affected your parenting at all?

For me, it’s always useful to be encouraged to ask myself why I do what I do, to interrogate my own practices. You fall into so many habits in life and in parenting. I think more than anything just being in the headspace of thinking about different approaches to childrearing has helped.

how we think about how parenting advice is generated

I wish, when I was a new parent, I would have known more about how infant and child care advice is manufactured, and how the advice evolves over time.

Totally. Something that sounds really off the wall and out there today may have actually been practical under different circumstances. We made fun of Mildred Spock for making her kids sleep outside, but maybe the air quality in their house was bad? Coal furnace or something? Similarly, it’s been refreshing to see how cyclical it is. There is truly nothing new under the sun. I’m sure there’s a bestselling book out there right now preaching the benefits of having your kids sleep under the open sky. Maybe for different reasons - fostering an appreciation for nature, appreciating the planet before it becomes any more actively hostile towards us, something having to do with signalling the aliens, I don’t know. It’s the same advice!

I wish that professional or expert parenting advice is based on a neat scaffolding system, where one expert builds upon and improves from the last expert. Very intentionally like a neat little Lincoln Log structure.

I see your reference to non-toxic wooden toys, and I will raise you by saying it’s actually more like a game of pick-up sticks, with advice just randomly stacked higgldy piggldy on top of other advice with some weird outliers that are depressingly easy to pick up.

Although sometimes it does seem to work rather neatly. Take the Back to Sleep campaign. That was really an evidence-based change in how babies were taken care of, where they used to be put on their stomachs to sleep, and then the advice changed to put them on their backs, and the rate of SIDS went down.

But even that is not straightforward!! Recently The Cut published an article about how TikTok and Instagram communities encourage co-sleeping, against American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations https://www.thecut.com/2023/04/co-sleeping-benefits-and-dangers.html 

But we’ve learned that parenting advice can swing wildly from one set of values to another. We know that Spock’s advice was an antithesis to the strict baby schedules that preceded his career.

I read in a Time Magazine article from 2012 about Dr. Sears, the pediatrician who wrote The Baby Book and promoted attachment parenting, that Sears was reacting to the cry-it-out sleep training method from Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Often, because conflict sells and controversy generates clicks, media portrays this reactionary evolution of parenting advice as an either-or binary. When, actually, probably most parents and their babies could benefit from a little bit of advice that is strict and a little bit of advice that is more lenient.

Right. We can’t ignore the fact that these books are published to make money. When people are scared and looking for some certainty in advice about something as vast and amorphous as parenting, they don’t want to hear “all things in moderation.” They want surefire solutions, and that’s what parenting books try to provide to mixed results. My husband and I joke that whenever we call the pediatrician, the response is “well, it could be nothing or he could be dying.” Sometimes, you will pay anything for someone to say “the answer is X.” 

How to evaluate parenting advice sources

Yes! Profit! Is a huge factor in, I mean, just about everything in American life, but also in the production and dissemination of information. We did a whole episode about why Spock was such a prolific author of parenting information: because he needed the cash!

If just one parent, somewhere out there, listens to this podcast and our conversation encourages them to evaluate a source of parenting advice, then I feel like the podcast was a success.

Yes, especially now when we’re inundated by so much crap advice from the internet. Information literacy is something we worry about our kids missing out on as they scroll through instagram or TikTok, but it’s something we have to remind ourselves to pursue even as parents seeking advice. Do you want to give a little information literacy lesson here? 

Yes, by “evaluate a source” I mean:

Who is this person? What are their credentials?

Are they affiliated with a credible organization? Or are they affiliated with a group or organization that has a bias, or an ulterior motive or agenda?

When was the information produced? Is it current? Or is it out-of-date?

Are any sources cited? And what 
are those sources?

Why was this created? And who’s the intended audience?

If it’s a social media post, you have to try and figure out if they’re selling something or sponsored by some entity. Are they expressing a personal opinion or are they representing the organization they work for? Have they provided some of the clues to whether a source is credible that Deborah just mentioned? I know that seems a little extra for a social media post, but it is true. People can say anything on the internet.

Something else I want to talk about, which is influencer culture. 

Where are parents getting advice and instruction on how to raise their kids

Books, maybe

My beloved magazines, maybe, but probably not?

Facebook groups, probably yes?

TikToks, definitely!

If we think back to early twentieth century parenting advice, and how it was 1. Filling in for the advice of grandmothers and aunties who used to help raise kids before industrialization and urbanization isolated young mothers; and 2. Giving a new revenue stream to male medical professionals.

I slightly wonder if social media, is a way for new parents who might be at a loss fo generationally passed down information, and isolated, to gather folk wisdom in a crowdsource way. Like in my day it was Baby Center forums, 

Yes and no? That has been the double edged sword of the modern social media era across the board, right? On the one hand, it’s been great at creating supportive communities for people who are isolated or otherwise marginalized. On the other, it has become a place where it’s extremely easy to disseminate and popularize ideas that are hateful, harmful, and just plain wrong. So yes, use social media to reclaim your folk wisdom, but keep your wits about you. Not everyone on the internet has your best interest at heart. And if you find the barrage of internet advice overwhelming or it creates feelings of shame or panic in you, you can remove yourself from that conversation. Buy books published by professionals or listen to your mothers or your neighbor down the street who seems to know what she’s talking about. It doesn’t have to happen online.

I think, probably, going forward I’m going to be more critical about information written for parents. And about parents. I don’t think there is any one perfect book that tells parents how to parent. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but Intentionally or not, a lot of popular information has an agenda. Even if the information is very science-based, evidence-based, it’s never neutral. You just can’t remove the author’s worldview, or historical perspective, or unconscious bias.

If we circle back to our information professional training, what’s best is reading widely! From a diverse collection of ideas. If you have a range of sources, and a range of perspectives, you can make your own, informed decisions about how to best parent your kids. 

This is not helpful if you’re up in the night with a baby who might have an ear infection. In that case, just from my personal experience, have one solid tome you trust that catalogs these early ailments - it could be Spock; it could be Sears; it could be Mayo Clinic, whatever. Have that one source that can be your rock, and maybe limit yourself to one internet resource in the middle of the night. One you already know and have gotten some solid advice from in the past. Resist the rabbit hole.

Speaking of reading widely, I want to mention our sources, our references. I was surprised by how much information about Dr. Spock is inaccessible. 

We are in a weird little point in time, in the news cycle, where there’s lots of information out there, good and bad, highlighting what AI can do. When I read about AI, experts in the technology claim that AI can do what it does because it’s gobbled up basically all of the text ever generated by humans on the internet. But it hasn’t! There’s so much that’s not on the internet!

We, as former librarians, are used to this “But Google!” argument, people who think everything is online. But it’s not! Particularly not historical information! Digitizing documents is expensive and time consuming. A lot of institutions with a lot of important historical information have neither the time nor money to put large amounts of their collections online.

A lot of the Spock information I used is print only. And I mean books that are only available from libraries because they are older books that are out of print, not available in bookstores. 

I also read newspaper articles, some were available online, for free. But a lot were only available through library databases. Which meant that I had to visit my public library’s website, log in with my library card into a database and retrieve the article. A few articles, I could get because my public library had to make an interlibrary loan request another library with different database subscriptions. 

And then, a couple of articles, I had to physically go to a University library, obtain a visitor pass, access a database from the library’s computer and get the article that way. Same with the documentary! I couldn’t stream it or even obtain a DVD of it. That’s the nature of older information. A lot of it is digitized, but it’s not on Google.

A lot of information about Spock, specifically, is just inaccessible. There are recordings of his speeches, and television appearances that would be incredible to watch on YouTube, but they’re not available. Take the Dr. Spock television show. Only 4 of the episodes have been digitized. It’s costly to get additional episodes digitized and I don’t know if anyone is going to do that!

I am really dismayed that I can get all 155 episodes of Sea Hunt - a series about a freelance scuba diver that aired 1958 to 1961 - on YouTube, but no episodes of the Dr. Spock TV show. And I’ve looked! Looking itself was not un-entertaining. I did come across a clip from the Carol Burnett show in which the actual identity of the invisible man was revealed to be Mr. Spock. Wrong Spock, but still, funny.

I’m sorry to all of the Star Trekkies who clicked on the link to our podcast only to discover, Wrong Spock.

For such an iconic person who died not that long ago, who had an enormous amount of media coverage about him, this is a good example of the limitations of old media technology.

Syracuse University holds the Benjamin Spock and Mary Morgan Papers archive and in their inventory of recordings by and about Spock, lots of the formating is listed as VHS and audio cassette tapes.

I would love to hear your archivist perspective on this

Things don’t just get automatically upgraded to new technology formats, unfortunately. Unless there is concrete demand and sufficient funds. In my experience, most archivists would love for their materials to be available to the widest possible audience. But it’s just not practical to digitize everything given the massive amount of material and the small amount of staffing and funding. Many institutions only have the means to house historical materials and do their best to make sure they do not degrade. VHS and audio cassette tapes are at least still readable with technology that is fairly readily available. At least those Spock recordings aren’t on wax cylinder or nitrate film. It is true though that most archival institutions are engaged in digitization efforts on at least some level, and they are conscious of what items in their collections are the most requested and could benefit from more efficient access. So perhaps we’ve inspired a wave of Spock researchers who will encourage a formatting upgrade for those Spock and Morgan papers. We can dream of seeing those Dr. Spock show episodes yet!

Acknowledgements

Speaking of research and archives, and how much we love libraries. We have some acknowledgements!

I got help from a lot of librarians in the Twin Cities: the Hennepin County Public Library staff, and the staff at the Magrath Library and the Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. 

Andy Lanset at the WNYC archives provided us with an incredible audio file to work with. Minnesota Public Radio gave us permission to use 72 seconds of audio, and they charged us $100 for it.

A volunteer attorney with Minnesota Lawyers for the Arts talked me through my copyright questions.

The Library of Congress’s Moving Image Research Center librarian answered our questions about the Dr. Spock TV show!

The Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center staff answered a lot of questions and provided us with materials from the Dr. Benjamin Spock and Mary Morgan papers.

Shela Faizi designed our incredible cover art.

And where would independent podcasters be without all of the Youtubers who make Audacity tutorials? Thank you!

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.

I’ve been saving this one! It’s my favorite, From p. 5, 1957 edition, On the hard work of parenting, and reward. Spock writes,

“Of course, parents don’t have children because they want to be martyrs, or at least they shouldn’t. They have them because they love children and want some of their very own. They also love children because they remember being loved so much by their parents in their own childhood. Taking care of their children, seeing them grow and develop into fine people, gives most parents--despite the hard work--their greatest satisfaction in life. This is creation. This is our visible immortality.”

End quote. OUR VISIBLE IMMORTALITY is how, ever since reading that passage, is how I think of and refer to my children. Time to wake up my visible immortality! Time to take my visible immortality to school! I’m going to schedule a dentist appointment for my visible immortality!

Katie, do you have a favorite Spock quotation or passage?

Not quite as profound as that, but I do appreciate the “take a breath, take a step back” tone I encountered in the early portions of the 10th edition. A quote that I really liked was “Children are driven from within to grow, explore, experience, and build relationships with other people. A lot of parenting lies in just letting your child follow these urges. Children are resilient. They make mistakes and suffer setbacks, then keep on growing.” Don’t you just feel instantly calmer after hearing that?

So I’ve been thinking about how to wrap this up, because we’ve reached the end of our Spock-tastic journey. And it’s been a great time of digging in to the foundation of contemporary parenting advice. I have a feeling that a lot of our listeners are parents, and I’d love to come up with something pithy that we can impart to our audience as we sign off. 

We’ve certainly unveiled the curtain a little bit, to show that parenting experts, while they may be writing from a very sincere place in their heart, that parenting advice is not value-neutral, is it? It’s just like anything else in this complicated world, it’s a nugget of good intentions wrapped in layers and layers of bias, social constructions, and economic realities.

Totally. And I would love to end with good, succinct way to summarize how parents should interact with parenting advice. 

I think I know where you’re going here. Should we say it?

I think we should say it!

Okay! 

Trust yourself!

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spock Talk! 

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.

Special thanks to Minnesota Public Radio!

Stay subscribed in case we ever again talk Spock!