Word: spock
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Books do not always reflect their authors' real-life personalities, but Spock's did. He was as he seemed: modest, funny, empathetic, confident enough in his own knowledge not to be stuffy about it. He was also a most unlikely revolutionary...
...grew up in comfortable circumstances, the eldest of six children, in New Haven, Conn. His lawyer father ceded child-raising duties to Spock's flamboyant, histrionic mother, who smothered her firstborn with love, rules and high expectations. During his first year at nearby Yale, the young man was expected to live at home and return each day for lunch. He eventually wheedled permission to room on campus, where he became, in several respects, a big man. Not only did he shoot up to 6 ft. 4 in., he also rowed on the Yale crew that won a gold medal...
While at Yale, he met Jane Cheney, a Bryn Mawr student to whom he proposed on their first date. Although Spock's mother had a low opinion of Bryn Mawr, Spock and Cheney were married in 1927. By that time, Spock was enrolled at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York City, where he graduated first in his class in 1929 and set up a pediatric practice. His experiences during the 1930s were crucial to the development of his child-rearing theories. He realized that most of the problems brought to him were behavioral rather...
...What Spock really did in Baby and Child Care, which he started writing in 1943, was to sneak Freudian concepts into the American middle-class mind. Surmising that new parents were not yet ready to hear of their infants' oral, anal and genital stages, Spock simply advised moms and dads not to get alarmed if baby sometimes behaved, well, oddly. He had learned from Freud that repression could produce catastrophic adult neuroses. Better, he advised, to wait things...
During the 1960s, when Spock and the first generation he had helped raise noisily protested the nuclear arms buildup and the war in Vietnam, critics blamed Spock's "permissive" book for causing all the uproar. "People who call the book permissive never use the book," Spock replied. "They never read it." He had a point. For all its emphasis on love, Spock's book equally stressed parents' obligations to set limits for their children, to teach them by example and precept "what's right and proper...