Spock’s advice for helping children with homework was interesting because in spite of the growing pressure, and even contractual arrangements and legislation in some jurisdictions in the UK, the US, and Canada for parents to oversee homework, Spock reiterated his 1946 recommendation that if they could afford it, parents should get a tutor rather than help their children with homework. Yet if in this sixth edition (1992) Spock seemed to be struggling with the relative place that reading and school work should occupy in family life, his seventh edition (1998), described as “fully revised and expanded for the new century,” laid these reservations to rest and embraced home reading as an essential practice for “raising mentally healthy children” (1998, p. 466). Reading, especially reading aloud during “family reading hour,” took a new and prominent place in Spock’s ideal family as an antidote to what he portrayed as the corrupting influences of new technologies and the mass media. In addition to parent-child reading, children also needed to see their parents reading. In fact, reading should be a “family value”:

A family reading hour is another way to promote reading. Your children witness sustained reading by the adults and learn that such reading is a strong family value. Ask friends to give books as presents for birthdays. Keep magazines and books around the house. I’m concerned that reading not become a lost art, made obsolescent by the electronic media. The gift of reading is the gift of imagination, access to new worlds and school success. Make sure it is a gift your child comes to appreciate and love. (p. 468)

According to Spock, media in the form of computer and video games and television were considered a threat to an “active inner life” (1998, p. 467). In a rather dramatic departure from previous editions in which reading to babies was not considered, in the 1998 edition, Spock echoed the advice in other popular advice texts and expounded on the necessity and virtues of reading to babies and young children, and went further than most in the amount of time he recommended dedicating to the practice: