Doctors’ Orders : Fight for Better Schools, Child Care, Baby Guru Spock Urges

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the world’s guru on raising children, said Friday that good child-rearing depends as much on what parents do outside the home as inside.

Spock, whose landmark book “Baby and Child Care” has guided mothers and fathers for nearly 50 years, urged parents of the 1990s to push politicians for more child-care aid and better schools--or risk a future filled with trouble for young people.

Spock cited alarming rates of teen-age suicide and youth violence, poverty and crowded classrooms in issuing his warning Friday to a luncheon audience of 120 local officials, doctors and child-care professionals at Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

“Our society in the United States, and to a degree around the world, is on the skids,” Spock said. The talk was aimed at drawing attention to the problems facing children, at a time of county financial crisis and a national debate over school lunch programs.

Spock’s remarks hopscotched from day care and television violence to his Vietnam protests and long-ago charges that his advice created permissive parents and a generation of rebellious kids. That accusation still stings the 91-year-old pediatrician, who said he was blamed by people opposed to his radical politics and confused by the rapid social change of the 1960s.

Despite the permissive image, Spock is no pushover. He bemoaned the lack of religion in modern American households, warned against sex without love and said parents must demand respect from their children.

“We’ve learned to respect children as a result of all the teaching, but we haven’t learned at the same time how to ask for respect from children,” Spock said. “Children need to respect their parents.”

A show of hands proved that most the audience used his book as a guide--or were raised by parents who did.

“When I was growing up, I hated the man because my mom said, ‘Dr. Spock said you’re going to respect your mother,’ ” said Debra Workman, a 33-year-old secretary at CHOC. “I said, ‘When I grow up, if I ever meet that man I’m going to punch him in the nose.’ ”

Instead, Workman was getting Spock to sign his latest book, “A Better World for Our Children.” Now a parent, Workman said the Spock teachings that influenced her upbringing in Garden Grove were part of the reason her three children respect her today.

“I didn’t want to punch him in the nose this time,” Workman said after the session. “I wanted to give him a hug.”

Pediatrician Norah Gutrecht clutched a dog-eared paperback copy of the Spock book, given to her in 1965 when her daughter was born, and a 20-year-old photograph of her posing with Spock at a West Virginia hospital where she once taught.

“Dr. Spock saved all pediatricians a lot of phone calls in the middle of the night. Parents would see a rash or hear a cough and look at the book first,” Gutrecht said. “We appreciate that.”

Spock’s writings are credited with profoundly affecting how children have been raised in the United States. His 1946 “Baby and Child Care” has sold 40 million copies and has been translated into 39 languages. It is being updated for the sixth time.

But he is more than a pediatrician. Spock, who won a gold medal for rowing in the 1924 Olympics, later made headlines when he was convicted for his anti-war activities in 1968 and ran for President on the People’s Party ticket in 1972. Recently, Spock created a minor furor when he said adults and children should follow a vegetarian diet and avoid milk after age 3.

Spock on Friday attributed his longevity to a macrobiotic diet he began when he became seriously ill four years ago. He urged parents to keep children away from sweets and fatty foods.

Most of Spock’s remarks centered on children’s emotional health. At times he mentioned his own strict upbringing, describing his mother as a scold who warned against “evil thoughts” and always seemed dissatisfied with her children.

He said today’s parents are guilt-ridden from being “scolded into the ground” by child experts and doctors and are afraid to follow their own instincts. He urged specialists to stop scolding parents.

“You don’t have to be disagreeable,” Spock said, “like my mother was.”