Benjamin Spock

“We all end up at least somewhat like our parents, especially in the way we deal with our children.”

“Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.”

“On the average, older parents are more flexible, tolerant, understanding, and happy in child care.”

“The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.”

“In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.”

“When women are encouraged to be competitive, too many of them become disagreeable.”

“Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be.”

“A surprising number of scientific advances have been made and masterpieces of art created by individuals just on the threshold of adulthood.”

“People have criticized me for seeming to step out of my professional role to become undignifiedly political. I'd say it was belated realization that day care, good schools, health insurance, and nuclear disarmament are even more important aspects of pediatrics than measles vaccine or vitamin D.”

“To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.”

“As a peace activist, I am dismayed by the encouragement of aggressiveness and violence by television, movies, and war toys.”

“What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?”

“The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.”

“All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.”

“I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.”

“There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother's age.”

“In automobile terms, the child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.”

“Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.”

“Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”

“I think we should bring up our children with much less pressure to compete and get ahead: no comparing one child with another, at home or in school; no grades. Let athletics be primarily for fun, and let them be organized by children and youths themselves.”