Parenting & Family Quote by Benjamin Spock

Spock sneaks a provocation into what sounds like gentle childcare advice: maybe pampering a kid isn’t a soft mistake but an early, low-stakes engine for ambition. The loaded phrase is “feeling of destiny.” He’s not claiming children are born entitled; he’s arguing that attention can manufacture a usable story about the self. If adults treat you like you matter, you start moving through the world as if you do, and that posture becomes performance, then habit, then identity.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the old Calvinist suspicion of indulgence, the idea that fussing over children spoils them into weakness. Spock, writing in the mid-century era when American parenting was being professionalized and psychoanalyzed, flips the anxiety: emotional investment isn’t coddling, it’s calibration. “Drive and confidence” are framed less as traits than as outcomes of a social environment, a scientific-sounding causal chain that invites parents to see themselves as architects, not just caretakers.

It also carries an implicit class critique without naming it. Who gets “fussed over” tends to map onto who gets resources, patience, and time. Spock’s optimism about destiny hints at the way privilege masquerades as personal grit. Yet he’s careful: “Perhaps” is the hedge of a clinician aware that attention can curdle into narcissism or pressure. The line works because it captures a modern paradox: we fear raising entitled kids, but we still need them to feel entitled to their own future.