Dr. Benjamin Spock

American pediatrician whose Baby and Child Care (1946) sold over fifty million copies and reshaped a century of parenting. He told an anxious postwar generation, "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." Trained in psychoanalysis as well as pediatrics, he insisted children were not little adults to be managed but small people to be understood — that warmth, flexibility, and respect were not indulgence but the foundation of character. Later in life he became an antiwar activist, arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, on the grounds that he had spent his life trying to raise healthy children only to see them sent to die.