Benjamin Spock

Benjamin Spock was an American pediatrician who trained in psychoanalysis in order to better understand children's emotional needs and family dynamics, becoming the first pediatrician to apply that training to child-rearing advice. His 1946 book Baby and Child Care told parents they knew more than they thought they did and became one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, selling roughly 500,000 copies within six months of publication and about 50 million by the time of Spock's death in 1998, reshaping mainstream American parenting toward a more flexible, affectionate approach. In the 1960s and 1970s he became a prominent anti-Vietnam War activist and in 1972 ran for president of the United States as the People's Party candidate, activism that made his parenting philosophy a target of critics who blamed it for social permissiveness, a charge he consistently rejected.