ARRIVING JUST IN TIME
In publishing his best seller, Common Sense Book of Baby & Child Care,1946, Benjamin Spock eased the anxiety of mothers eager to provide a proper, an informed, the latest-word on upbringing for their children. I was two when this book was published and, while not a baby-boomer in the strict sense of the word--not born during the postwar "baby boom--my mother was certainly influenced by Spocks ideas as were generations after WW2. The book sold 50 million copies and, after the Bible, was the biggest selling book in the USA. A westernizing world needed a more flexible, trusting and individual approach to child-rearing and lifeand the growing Bahai community with its continuous need for pioneers who would leave their homes for strange and exotic lands and who would be required to work in and with immensely heterogeneous groupsneeded this type of person as well. Spock came along just in timeor so I like to think.
I am writing this prose-poem, not so much about Dr. Spock, but about my mothers child-rearing practice, influenced as it was by this influential paediatrician and my early childhood, pre-school, experience. Before Spock, John B. Watson, a no-nonsense, no kissing, no hugging, no-sit-on-lap type of child-rearing chap and his child-rearing philosophy held sway. Spock put some feeling and flexibility back into the process of child-rearing. Just before I left the classroom as a full-time teacher in 1999 and with a crucial stage in the parenting role also about to end with one year to go before my last child graduated from university, Dr. Spock died. He was 94. He had been around all my life: as a child, an adolescent, an adult, a parent and a teacher. He seemed to deserve a place in my prose-poetry. Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 June 2007.
I really dont know what you read(1)
when I was two or three or four
while Spock was reversing the pattern,
standard and style of child-rearing
from its old lock-step, no-nonsense,
let them cry approach. His was an
individually tailored, trust-yourself
flexibility for the new age--approach.
But whatever you read and whatever
you tried, it was tough work for you,
a mother at 40, a little late to say the
least, especially back then, way back
then as that first Plan(1937-1944) was
ending, God Passes By was finally at
the Bahai book stores(2) and that band
of apostolic founders was completing
one of the noblest episodes in the history
of the first Bahai centurythe triumph
of the first stage in Abdul-Bahas Plan.(3)
1 My mother in the years 1946 to 1948, when I was two to four years old.
2 This book was Shoghi Effendis gift to the Bahai world in August 1944. I was 4 weeks old and my mother nearly died in those first weeks of my life.
3 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America, Wilmette, 1947, p. 71.
Ron Price
11 June 2007
(updated for: Mac Forums)
26/8/07
In publishing his best seller, Common Sense Book of Baby & Child Care,1946, Benjamin Spock eased the anxiety of mothers eager to provide a proper, an informed, the latest-word on upbringing for their children. I was two when this book was published and, while not a baby-boomer in the strict sense of the word--not born during the postwar "baby boom--my mother was certainly influenced by Spocks ideas as were generations after WW2. The book sold 50 million copies and, after the Bible, was the biggest selling book in the USA. A westernizing world needed a more flexible, trusting and individual approach to child-rearing and lifeand the growing Bahai community with its continuous need for pioneers who would leave their homes for strange and exotic lands and who would be required to work in and with immensely heterogeneous groupsneeded this type of person as well. Spock came along just in timeor so I like to think.
I am writing this prose-poem, not so much about Dr. Spock, but about my mothers child-rearing practice, influenced as it was by this influential paediatrician and my early childhood, pre-school, experience. Before Spock, John B. Watson, a no-nonsense, no kissing, no hugging, no-sit-on-lap type of child-rearing chap and his child-rearing philosophy held sway. Spock put some feeling and flexibility back into the process of child-rearing. Just before I left the classroom as a full-time teacher in 1999 and with a crucial stage in the parenting role also about to end with one year to go before my last child graduated from university, Dr. Spock died. He was 94. He had been around all my life: as a child, an adolescent, an adult, a parent and a teacher. He seemed to deserve a place in my prose-poetry. Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 June 2007.
I really dont know what you read(1)
when I was two or three or four
while Spock was reversing the pattern,
standard and style of child-rearing
from its old lock-step, no-nonsense,
let them cry approach. His was an
individually tailored, trust-yourself
flexibility for the new age--approach.
But whatever you read and whatever
you tried, it was tough work for you,
a mother at 40, a little late to say the
least, especially back then, way back
then as that first Plan(1937-1944) was
ending, God Passes By was finally at
the Bahai book stores(2) and that band
of apostolic founders was completing
one of the noblest episodes in the history
of the first Bahai centurythe triumph
of the first stage in Abdul-Bahas Plan.(3)
1 My mother in the years 1946 to 1948, when I was two to four years old.
2 This book was Shoghi Effendis gift to the Bahai world in August 1944. I was 4 weeks old and my mother nearly died in those first weeks of my life.
3 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America, Wilmette, 1947, p. 71.
Ron Price
11 June 2007
(updated for: Mac Forums)
26/8/07
