“The
Heart Grows Smarter” describes a Harvard study that tracked students from 1938
on and now has come to an unexpected conclusion: “It was the capacity for
intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects” of their
lives.
Those
with close emotional bonds not only lived longer and did better but, pace Dr.
Freud, changed and re-invented themselves even after difficult early years.
None
of this comes as a surprise to the editor and friend of Dr. Benjamin Spock who invented
modern American childhood after World War II with a parenting guide that became
the best-selling book in history after the Bible.
It
changed the mindset of treating children as creatures to be trained and
restrained to seeing them as human beings to be loved and nurtured.
Along
the way, his followers and indeed Dr. Spock himself discovered the difficulties
that come with a tectonic shift in social and cultural ideas. He became distraught
over the duplicity of politicians and morphed into a leading opponent of the
Vietnam War along with Martin Luther King.
A
decade later, the beloved baby doctor of the 1950s was indicted for “conspiracy
to counsel, aid and abet resistance to the draft,” convicted and sentenced to
jail, but results of the blatantly political trial were overturned and Dr. Spock
devoted his remaining years to social protest.
“I’ve
spent my life,” he wrote, “studying and advising how to bring up children to be
well-adjusted and happy. Now I see the futility of such efforts if these
children are then to be incinerated in an imbecilic war.”
Now
as Brooks celebrates a new study that vindicates Spock’s ideas about
childhood and later life that, for better or worse, helped shape the Baby
Boomers, how do Americans reconcile knowledge of what makes for personal
happiness with the political dislocations that roil their lives?
Election results won’t provide any answers but, unless those underlying questions are
addressed, America will be an unhappy place for a long time to come.
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