Benjamin McLane Spock was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 2, 1903, to Mildred Stoughton and Benjamin Ives Spock. He studied history and literature at Yale University before attending medical school at Columbia, where he graduated in 1929 with a specialty in pediatrics. He continued to study psychoanalysis while operating a private pediatric clinic in New York. He served as a psychiatrist for the U.S. military during World War II, but Spock was best known for his writings on childcare, and later, his political activism.

In 1927, Spock married Jane Cheney, also a student of psychoanalysis, and the Spock family gained two sons, Michael in 1933 and John in 1944. Spock and Cheney were divorced in 1975, and he married his second wife, Mary Morgan, ...