Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose common-sense theories of child care helped guide parents around the world during the last half-century, has died. He was 94.
Spock died Sunday in San Diego, according to Dr. Stephen Pauker, who had been Spock's physician for 12 years."He died with his family at home," Pauker said Monday from his home in Wellesley, Mass. He did not give the cause of death.
Spock's "Baby and Child Care," first published in 1946, was the bible of parents in the baby boom that followed World War II. "Trust yourself," Spock told parents. "You know more than you think you do."
"I wanted to be supportive of parents rather than to scold them," he said. "The book set out very deliberately to counteract some of the rigidities of pediatric tradition, particularly in infant feeding.
"It emphasized the importance of great differences between individual babies, of the need for flexibility and of the lack of necessity to worry constantly about spoiling."
In subsequent years, as the paperback sold 50 million copies and was translated into more than 30 languages, Spock came under fire from critics who branded him the "the father of permissiveness," responsible for a "Spock-marked" generation of hippies.
Spock joined those youths in protests against nuclear technology and the Vietnam War. Vice President Spiro Agnew accused him of corrupting the youths of America; Spock claimed only a "mild influence."
Through it all, the big-boned, 6-foot-4 inch Spock said he never changed his basic philosophy on child care - "to respect children because they're human beings and they deserve respect, and they'll grow up to be better people."
Benjamin McLane Spock was born May 2, 1903, in New Haven, Conn., oldest of six children of a lawyer whose Dutch ancestors once spelled their names Spaak. He attended Yale University, where he joined the crew team and helped win a gold medal at the 1924 Olympics.
He decided on medicine after spending a summer as a counselor at a camp for crippled children. Following graduation from Yale, he earned his medical degree at Columbia University and studied at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
Spock's first marriage, in 1927 to the former Jane Cheney, ended in divorce after 48 years. They had two sons - Michael, a museum director, and John, who studied architecture and became a construction company owner.
Spock married Mary Morgan, almost 40 years his junior, in 1976. He said later he became more easy-going, able to appear in public without the traditional three-piece suit with watch chain, and he took up a health food diet.
Just 2 1/2 weeks ago, Morgan pleaded for help in paying Spock's $10,000-a-month medical bills.
Funeral plans were pending.