Motherhood Quote by Benjamin Spock

Spock’s line is a quiet coup against the cult of expert-driven parenting, delivered with the soothing confidence of a doctor who knew he was stepping on other doctors’ toes. “Instinctively” is the loaded word: it rehabilitates parental intuition at a moment in American life when childrearing was being professionalized, measured, and standardized. Mid-century parenting advice often treated the home like a laboratory, where the right schedule and the correct technique could engineer a well-adjusted citizen. Spock flips that script. He grants parents moral permission to trust their own impulses, then seals it with the clinical-sounding “usually best,” a hedge that keeps him inside the boundaries of science while still undermining scientific overreach.

The subtext is a critique of anxiety economies. Parenting manuals don’t just inform; they produce worry, then sell relief. Spock’s sentence interrupts that loop by suggesting the simplest, least monetizable resource - attunement to your child - is already available. Yet the sentence also reveals its era’s assumptions: “mothers and fathers” as a stable, default unit; “babies” as the focus of intensive care; “instinct” as something reliable and shared. That’s comforting, but it’s also normative, leaving out parents who don’t feel instinctive confidence, or whose circumstances make “what feels right” impossible.

What makes the line endure is its balancing act: it’s anti-authoritarian without being anti-knowledge. Spock isn’t telling parents to ignore medicine; he’s telling them that expertise should serve the relationship, not replace it.