Medicine: Care & Feeding of Spock

“Since he was the first of six children . . . his mother was particularly careful about what she fed him (after your second or third you don’t worry so much about what the book says), and in 1903 she followed Holt’s Care and Feeding of Infants to the letter, like all conscientious mothers. In those days solid foods weren’t introduced until the child was nearly a year old, and bananas were considered indigestible. [He] had to wait until he was twelve years old before he was allowed his first half banana, and he almost expected to fall dead at the first taste of the forbidden fruit.”

Thus does famed Pediatrician Benjamin Spock describe his own childhood in his new book, Feeding Your Baby and Child, written with Nutritionist Miriam E. Lowenberg (Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $3.75). Young Ben Spock’s individual difficulties with food were the commonest kind: he was “something of a feeding problem,” “very squeamish about lumps in cereal and scum on cocoa,” and could not eat summer squash for 35 years because his mother forced it down him at the age of five.

Now the U.S.’s most relaxed and one of its most permissive authorities on the raising of children, Pediatrician Spock frames his advice to mothers so as to give today’s kids the benefit of what he learned the hard way, e.g.:

¶Bananas can be given when the baby is only two to four months old; they may be his first solid food and will certainly be his first raw fruit.

¶Children of all ages up to 16 should be fed as often as they are really hungry (a fine point that mother must judge with

Solomonic wisdom); the three-meals-a-day routine is too arbitrary. <JI Infant appetites can be whetted with color: Drs. Spock and Lowenberg even advocate colored ice cubes to put in milk, and such fancies as “green mashed potato nests with ham” for a Christmas party. t| If a child does not feel like taking his breakfast protein in milk or eggs, it is all right to give him a peanut-butter sandwich before school—or chipped steak.

However, Dr. Spock still insists on some rules: “Candy does a child no good, and encourages decay of the teeth. Postpone it as long as possible . . . Most important, don’t offer it as a bribe for eating other foods or being good. This dangling of candy before a child keeps increasing his appetite for it.”

Strangely, Drs. Spock and Lowenberg seem not to have got the word that spinach, far from being a great bodybuilder, can actually be bad for growing children (TIME, March 30, 1953). All they concede is that if it causes chapping of the lips or anus, it is well to “omit it for several months and try again.” That sounds more like old Dr. Holt.