Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous 1946 child care manual, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, sold half a million copies in its first six months and took up residence on bookshelves across the country during the years that followed. But American mothers were not the only ones reading Dr. Spock. After World War II, American humanitarian workers heading to war-devastated areas packed The Common Sense Book into their suitcases. They hoped that Spock’s child-rearing methods—methods that by war’s end were understood to be distinctly American—would improve the welfare of children across the globe. They also hoped that the child-rearing philosophy advocated by Spock and his peers would help forge a generation of youngsters equipped for life in a democracy. This paper explores the role of American child-rearing wisdom in U.S.-led nation-building efforts after the Second World War. American voluntary workers sometimes successfully transplanted Spock’s advice into foreign soil. But efforts to shape nations by molding children, this paper demonstrates, sometimes produced unexpected results.
About the presenterSara Fieldston
Sara Fieldston is the author of Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century (Harvard, 2015). She is Assistant Professor of History at Seton Hall University.