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Show pr. seock: FrOM Child Care to The “nation’s godfather” is ogain in the news, this time with some provocative views on sex, marriage, and morality HE COUNTRY’S most publicized pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, has just writven a new book called “Decent and Indecent—Our Personal and Political Behavior.” The book had only been on stores’ shelves a few hours when an indignant Philadelphia woman charged back to where she had earlier made her purchase and indignantly demanded her money back: “I raised my Arnold on Doctor Spock’s theories. I agreed wholeheartedly with his sentiments about equally provocative: @ “Americans can now talk boldly or jokingly about sex in mixed company—though I think there is often a forced quality to this.” @ “Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic creature, yet he’s potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay hands on in the name of his tribe or his God.” @ “Most Americans who consider themselves thinking people are disillusioned but are not conscious of this feeling. They are not disenchanted with the physical aspects of civilizction. They are proud of spaceships and artificial hearts. What they have lost is a belief in the dignity of man.” “My family settled in New England long before 1776,” he said, “and as long as I can remember, we were rock-rib Republicen. My father was a lawyer for the New Haven Railroad. He believed that you could best serve mankind by being physically fit—that it was your moral responsibility to keep in shape.” Spock “keeps in shape” by bicycling. We accompanied him on a cycling trip around New York's Central Park. While pedaling vigorously in a cold, wet wind, he told us that he was sent to Andover, the classic preparatory school for Yale and then to Yale itself. There he made Scroll and Key, one of the most exclusive clubs, and pulled an oar on the rowing team that went to the 1924 Olympics. He decided to become a doctor and attended the Yale Medical School and the College of Physi- ending the war in Vietnam. I wept with joy when his indictment for helping others to cope with the draft was overturned. But this is just too much! My goodness, there’s a new Doctor Spock—he’s a sexual reactionary, and he favors hypocritical enslavement of women!” She then showed the startled saleslady several sections of the book that had enraged her: @ “For decades,” writes the peacenik-pediatrician, “I was an uncompromising civil libertarian and scorned the hypocrisy usually involved in the enforcement of obscenity laws. But recent trends in movies, literature, and art toward what I think of as shock-obscenity, and thecourts’ acceptance ofit, have made me change my position... . I would now join a majority in favor of new laws which would determine guilt simply on thebasis of judges’ and juries’ sense of shock and revulsion.” @ “When a husbandtells his wife about his troubles at the office, he wats her to sympathize with him in his feelings of frustration. He does not want her to tell him how easily she herself would have surmounted these difficulties.” @ “It would be fairer if they (women) were brought up at home and educated in such a spirit that they would enjoy, feel proud of, and be fascinated by child-rearing rather than frustrated byit.” Other passages of the book are 6 Family Weekly, April 26, 1970 Dr. Spock, child authority for thousands of mothers, examines host ‘alized beg: Doctor Spock’s new book will surprise many parents who learned to dren are “Spock babies.” We found out that the doctor defies being put into a convenient slot when we recently traveled with him, talked with him, listened to the man who has changed more parent-child relationships than anyone in the country. Doctor Spock feels that his radical response to the Vietnam involvement was dictated by his own parents. “They used to counsel me,” he told us, “ ‘choose the right way and not the easy,’ and, ‘accept service to others as a moral obligation.’ cians and Surgeons of Columbia University. In 1927, while still at medical school, he married Jane Cheney, a pretty Connecticut girl. They have two children, both boys. Spock studied pediatrics and psychiatry. He was one of the first American docturs to complete residencies in both fields. When the demands of World War II inducted Spock into the Navy, the mothers of his patients begged him to write down instructions on child-rearing that would cover everything but emergencies until he got back. That’s how the popular book, “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” came to be written. He has no explanation for its phenomenal success. The message was simply Icve your baby, observe him sympathetically to see what he needs and wants, enjoy him, trust yourself. Somehow, it answered to the condition of large numbers of mothers. The phrase “Dr. Spock says .. .” became a tender shield against other, more rigid doctors. A large part of a whole generation of babies was fed when hungry, cuddied when they cried, and allowed to crawl and play in the mud. Doctor Spock's babies grew up to throw him a rough challenge. “Just because 23 million copies of my book were sold doesn’t mean everyone who bought it did what I said,” he remarked a little plaintively. “Some wouldn’t or couldn’t. I had no idea T was going to We charged with organizing a new iife style, nor did I intend to do so.” Nevertheless Doctor Spock has been blamed for the hippies and the yippies, the flower children and the . “Hell’s Angels” and for somecollege rebels. He has participated in dozens of peace demonstrations, and in every one of them there has been at least one gawky youngster who carried a sign that said, “I was a Speck baby.” “Usually,” says Doctor Spock wonderingly, “when the mothers who claim they raised their children by my book see their youngsters marching down the street, they begin to cry. I don’t know why.I’ve beentold I’m a Pied Piper, but the fact is I’ve never made any strong pitch to these kids—they made it to me.” In the early 1960's, scientific material passing across Doctor Spock's desk made him feel increasingly concerned about the dangers of nv- clear fallout. He spoke out against nuclear-weapons testing and soon found himself drawn into the total anti-war protest. “1 know it upset a lot of parents that a baby doctor could take a controversial stand,” he told us. “Butif they hold me responsible for having a lot to do with bringing their children up, I have to ask what's the point of doctors and parents working and sacrificing to bring up healthy, well-adjusted children if they are going to be incinerated? “Tf a baby gets to be one year old,” |