Spock Babies: The Discourse on Generation and Child in a Childrearing Manual in the Postwar Era Takahito Moriyama Many studies on generation often focus on the youth. This article, however, pays attention to children by analyzing Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, considering how the perception of children and the discourse of generation changed after World War II. This article has two issues: the transition of authority from the family to larger society, and the changing conception of young people in the postwar era. It is said that in the 1940s and 1950s the spread of television, the popularized education, and the culture of fun shifted the main influence on children from parents to the mass media or peer groups. However, the childrearing manual shows that American middle-class families attempted to adapt themselves to the circumstances under which American works and occupations went through transfiguration and company organizations required a new kind of human character. A huge generation of baby boomers always attracted much attention when they were children, students, and consumers. We can see the child-centeredness in families, and baby boomers were also the center of the market. By the late 1960s when student movements occurred, adults “discovered” youth as a new stage of life between adolescence and adulthood. Here the rift between generations was emphasized, and more importantly, the line between childhood and adulthood was obscured. The changing socialization and the discourse of generation intertwined with each other by the 1960s. Many have pointed out the historical discontinuity of generations, yet considering two issues above shows the continuity between new and old generations.