The Coral Gables Times

A House Call on Dr. Spock

BY MARION LOWNDES Editor of Suburbia Today Your editor visits a hard-driving, dedicated man who revels, like his Author with the famous baby doctor. MANY SMALL CHILDREN, as we all know, have close imaginary friends. Nobody ever sees these characters, but they're very good company and usually have fine, fancy names like Timothy and Ow, or Mr. Roosey-Goosey—names you don't forget. Today some 13 million mothers also have a friend they have never seen, but they consult him often and come away encouraged. His name is Dr. Spock. Benjamin Spock's "Baby and Child Care" is the biggest best seller ever written in this country, and is now in print in 16 foreign languages as well, including Arabic and Finnish. When he was asked to write the book, he was a busy, practicing pediatrician, but over the next three years he somehow found time to do it, working six hours a day on his vacation and four evenings of every working week. "I wanted," he says, "to offer parents the combination of psychological and physical care needed in child care. I wanted to write to a mother in a way that would reassure her. I didn't want to scold or lecture her." And from that now-famous opening sentence, "You know more than you think you do," right on to the end, he has reassured countless apprehensive mothers, while discussing, fully and calmly, such sometimes unavoidable problems as "Adenoids . . . Aggressiveness . . . Biting humans . . ." on through to "Weaning . . . Worms . . . Zweiback." Now a second book has appeared, "Dr. Spock Talks With Mothers." In the same friendly, sensible way he counsels parents who are apt to be confused by the changing attitudes and habits of their school-age child—"the grittiness that comes between them," as he puts it—and from there he goes on to explore the turbulent adolescent world as well. "Ben has empathy," a colleague from the Mayo Clinic observes. "He feels with the parent and with the child, and because he can put himself in the anxious parent's place he can communicate his own learning to them. He knows what they want to know and need to know." He smiled suddenly. "His own boys were handfuls, too!" When the second book came out, the editors of SUBURBIA TODAY asked to pay a house call on this very real, but usually invisible, friend of so many parents and children. He lives, we found, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife Jane, whom he thanks in the introduction of "Baby and Child Care" for contributing "endless time, work, patience, much of the practicality in the detailed directions in the book, and wonderful judgment." They have been married a long time now, since 1927, and are the parents of two sons, Michael and John. They are also proud and devoted grandparents. Michael's older son Danny is two, and Peter arrived last March—"very tall and handsome," his grandmother reported, "with red hair." John, who is 17, is taking his last year of high school abroad, at the Westminster School in London—a daring and far from carefree experiment undertaken at his own request. At last reports, however, he was rowing on the crew, like his father before him, and "what a feeling of power and speed one gets." School life was looking up. OUTWARDLY there is nothing to distinguish the Spocks' comfortable 40-year-old stucco house from any other comfortable old house on the pleasant street where they live. The surprises are inside. There is a sense of restfulness as soon as you come in which is in no way impaired by the sight of Dr. Spock's writing table and high stool in one corner of the living room. The house looks easy to work in and much enjoyed. From room to room the floors are covered in a sweep of pale gray carpeting, and all the windows have the same treatment—long, translucent white curtains which let the light through but mask the street "It's easier for us—and the neighbors," Mrs. Spock says. The second impression is of brilliant illumina- Suburbia Today, February 1962 8