Dr. Benjamin Spock became a household name based on his book Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, published in 1946 just as the United States was embarking on one of the great demographic events in its history, the Baby Boom.
Dr. Spock’s book represented a break from traditional thinking (and writing) about baby and child care, which usually took the form of strict directives from expert practitioners about what parents must do (no wavering!) to raise good citizens. By contrast, Dr. Spock wrote in a folksy, calming style that dared to suggest that parents should trust their instincts rather than always falling in line behind the expert wisdom. As Dr. Spock put it in one of the book’s most famous sentences: “You know more than you think you do.”
Yet in adopting this soothing approach, couched in conversational, everyday language, Dr. Spock actually was consciously downplaying one of the major influences that underlay his child-rearing philosophy. And in doing so, he exemplified one of the hallmarks of effective communication that would be cited more than sixty years later in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick.
For Dr. Spock was in fact a firm believer in Freudian psychology, which was still quite controversial in the 1940s. A large part of Dr. Spock’s intent with his baby book was to meld child-rearing advice with Freudian theory, with its emphasis on observing certain natural phases of development rather than adhering to strict timetables regarding eating, thumb-sucking, and the like.
But Dr. Spock avoided the use of technically accurate Freudian terms such as “id,” “ego,” and “Oedipal complex,” which he knew would put off the average reader of the time. Instead, as his biographer Thomas Maier writes, “Spock improvised fundamentals of Freudian theory throughout his baby book’s prose, like a leitmotiv, without identifying the composer by name…. The psychological reasons for children’s behavior were put forth like the acquired wisdom of a Yankee country doctor, not like a man who had been psychoanalytically trained.”
“I wasn’t particularly trying to hide the Freudian origins,” said Dr. Spock, “but I was aware that I would lose my audience if I tried to drag in Freud too much.”
I think Dr. Spock intuitively realized something about effective communication that the Heaths later emphasized in Made to Stick: Useful shorthand is better than useless accuracy. Dr. Spock understood his audience (typical new parents) and his purpose (to popularize a more humane approach to child-rearing) with crystal clarity. He knew that using technically correct (and highly charged) Freudian concepts in a mass-market book would undermine that purpose. Instead, by using an accessible style that appealed to his audience, and by focusing on the underlying core message of the theory rather than on the theory itself, Dr. Spock was wildly successful in achieving his purpose.
REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER
What drives the people in the front lines of your organization? Do you think they’re motivated to jump out of bed every day, charge in to work, roll up their sleeves, and solve important problems with energy and creativity out of a burning desire to “maximize shareholder value”?
If you don’t believe that’s the conscious driver of their actions – even though it may be a technically accurate description of what they’re there to do – then what can you do to translate the organization’s strategic goals into language (including metaphors, stories, and images) that will connect directly with their hopes, dreams, desires – and motivators for action?
For another example of someone who tilted against the same conventional child-rearing wisdom that Dr. Spock countered in his book, see also my article on Harry Harlow.
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