Benjamin Spock’s name became synonymous with child rearing and
development after the publication of his 1946 book The Common
Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. (Library of Congress)
1921 Spock began his first year at Yale University, fol-
lowed by a summer job as a counselor for disabled
children. At the home for crippled children, Spock
watched an orthopedic operation, at which point he
decided to become a pediatrician. He was graduated
from college and remained at Yale for the first two
years of medical school.
While at Yale, Spock met Jane Cheney. He and
Cheney corresponded for many years and married in
- They moved to New York City and Spock trans-
ferred from Yale to Colombia University to complete
his medical training. He graduated at the top of his
class in 1929. His good grades and dedication helped
Spock secure an internship at a Presbyterian hospital.
In order to help with finances, Jane Spock found a job
as a research assistant, exploring the relationship be-
tween psychology and illness. This was a novel con-
cept at the time, and Jane Spock’s experiences with
Freudian psychoanalysis affected her husband’s views
on psychology and medicine.
In 1931 Spock began another internship in pedi-
atrics, but he felt strongly that he needed training in
psychology as well. After an extensive search for a
program that addressed both psychology and medi-
cine, and finding that no such program existed,
Spock settled on a residency at Cornell University’s
Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. In the late 1930s,
he opened a pediatric practice where he applied
Freudian theory to his assessment of children’s needs.
In 1946 Spock published the first edition of his
famous book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child
Care. Although he never mentioned Freudian theo-
ries, he clearly applied them in his books. In the later
editions of the book, Spock changed some of his ad-
vice in response to advancing research and theory in
child development. Throughout his career, he con-
tinued to serve as a pediatrician and political activist
and to write books about child care, specific points of
child development, family values, disabled children,
parenting practices, and politics.See also: THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENTBibliography
Maier, Thomas. Dr. Spock: An American Life. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1998.
Publications by Spock
Spock, Benjamin, and Marion O. Lerrigo. Caring for Your Disabled
Child. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Spock, Benjamin, and Steven Parker. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child
Care. New York: Pocket Books, 1998.
Diane B. LeachSTAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
Imagine a playground full of children on a warm sum-
mer day. A toddler tentatively makes her way across
the sand to retrieve a shovel then, with a smile of tri-
umph, retreats to her mother’s side. Nearby a pair of
two-year-olds dig in the sand side by side, practically
touching yet seemingly unaware of one another. A
band of boisterous five-year-olds rush past them,
chasing an imagined pirate on a tumultuous sea. A
quick survey of these intersecting scenes shows that
these groups of children are clearly going about the
business of learning and play in very different ways,
at increasing levels of sophistication. Over the years,
developmental psychologists have confronted the
question of how best to characterize these changes in
both cognitive and social functioning. Is it a simple
matter of children adding to their repertoire of skills
and knowledge as they get older (quantitative
change), or do higher levels of functioning actually
represent a reorganization of the previous level of
functioning, much in the way that a caterpillar goes
through discrete stages of life on the way to becoming
a butterfly (qualitative change)? ‘‘Stage models’’ of
development are based on a combination of these two
types of conceptualizations. Psychologists have devel-
oped such models for understanding and explaining
both cognitive and psychosocial development.382 STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT