What single artifact made the ’60s the ’60s? One could make a case for the Martin guitar, the weapon of mass revolution slung around the necks of the folk singers and rockers who provided a soundtrack for the era. One could make a solid case, too, for the tetrahydrocannabinol molecule, put to far more extensive use than any other drug of the time. But for my money, that single artifact would be a well-thumbed paperback copy of the owner’s manual that came issued with children of the baby boom: Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, first published 70 years ago, in January 1946.

Baby-rearing manuals of earlier generations took a rather stern view of their subjects, reckoned to be little monsters who would twist affection into weakness. Under that social Darwinist flag, psychologists enjoined mothers from rocking a wailing infant, dandling it, or, worse, giving it a peck: “Never, never kiss your child,” counseled John Watson in his standard Psychological Care of Infant and Child, for to kiss a child would leave one’s fontanel of protective psychic armor forever unfused.

Nonsense, said Benjamin Spock. He had grown up under such a regime, the child of a prominent Connecticut attorney, shunted off to boarding school and then Yale. A classic overachiever, he had been an Olympic rower, graduated first in his class in medical school, achieved every professional honor. Yet he drew two conclusions from his training. The first, born of his strict Freudianism, was that children craved affection and contact. The second, the product of extensive reading of the ethnographic literature, was that children thrived when allowed freedom. An anthropology professor of mine used to joke that Spock’s book really should have born the title How to Raise Your Child Like a Samoan, but the fact remains: if John Watson decried the thought of a child being kissed, Benjamin Spock advocated for the notion that a crying infant should be rewarded with a breast on demand, any time, anywhere.

Predictably, Spock was denounced at once for what was tantamount to anarchy. It was not until the early 1960s, though, when the first generation of children raised under his counsel entered adulthood, that the howls came louder. Richard Nixon had enough self-knowledge to understand that his young political opponents might have had legitimate grievances, but Spiro Agnew did not. What brought the children out into the streets to protest Vietnam and his own administration was not the democratic impulse, he grumbled, but the “permissiveness” that Spock had wrought.

What Benjamin Spock permitted was knowledge and self-knowledge. His book remains readable and current today not just because of its essential wisdom, but also because it assumed that interested parents would take it as a starting point to join to their own expertise. “Don’t be afraid to trust your own common sense,” counseled Dr. Spock. Like-minded books, such as the Boston Women’s Collective’s Our Bodies, Our Selves, published 45 years ago this month, took his DIY intentions even farther, ensuring that we would become participants in rather than mere consumers of our own lives. Revolutionary indeed, that, just as was Dr. Spock’s thought that babies need—yes, love.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.