There Used to Be Consensus on How to Raise Kids
This article is part of Parenting in an Uncertain Age, a series about the experience of raising children in a time of great change.
As I think of today’s parents, who fear they aren’t doing a good enough job, I sometimes imagine the arrival of a new Dr. Benjamin Spock, a calming presence to rein in the tumult of parental angst. After the devastation of war, in the period from the late 1940s through the 1950s and into much of the ’60s, Spock’s sound advice and soothing voice assured mothers that they could raise their children capably and with a certain delight in the experience.
Spock was ubiquitous throughout the West in the post–World War II world. Indeed, it was striking that so many parents in so many places were reading from his 1946 guide, . Spock’s child-rearing manual was second only to the Bible in volume of sales in the United States. His ideas reached even those who did not read him, via the mass media and doctors who relied on his books. In
