Goodbye, Dr. Spock

"Why not use restraints? Why not tie babies' arms down or put aluminum mittens over their hands to keep them from thumb-sucking? This would frustrate them a good deal, which theoretically is not a good idea."

"Certainly the parents shouldn't put on acts to bribe the child to eat, such as a little story for every mouthful or a promise to stand on their heads if the spinach is finished."

Easy, sensible words, after the stern admonishments experts had offered previously - spare the rod, spoil the child warnings to mothers that they took the intuitive path at their babies' peril.

The encouraging voice of Dr. Benjamin Spock came as a welcome relief in the 1950s, as did that of the other doctor - Dr. Seuss, or Theodor Geisel, whose "Cat in the Hat" blew the unabashed squareness of "Dick and Jane" out of the water.

Dr. Spock's death on Sunday followed Dr. Seuss's in this decade, but not before both could see their writings passed on to a second generation of appreciative readers.

Because extended families are dispersing and parents are having children later in life, child-raising lore is growing increasingly hard to come by. Dr. Spock offered nuts-and-bolts advice in an age that needed it sorely.

He also championed the cause of pacifism - arguing that it was senseless to rear children only to extinguish their lives in war. Over the course of seven revisions of his "Baby and Child Care," he also revisited his ideas about whether mothers of young children ought to work, although to the end he said he had never heard of a mother who had managed to pull it off to her own satisfaction.

His will be a tough act to follow.