Remembering beloved children's author Beverly Cleary

Before the 1950s and the invention of a creature called the teenager, being a kid could be a drag. Rules were strict, dress codes severe, parents loving but still bound to the convention that children should be seen and not heard.

That began to change when Benjamin Spock's book "Baby and Child Care" came along. Published in 1946, it percolated into the culture a few years later, rebelling against the prevailing child rearing advice ("Never, never kiss your child," counseled one standard text, urging that to do so would leave the poor thing without adequate psychological defenses.) Nonsense, Spock insisted. Give all the love in the world, and let your children live their lives unimpeded by too many rules. Thus were the Sixties born. The time was exactly right for another revolution, overthrowing a children's literature that ranged from the didacticism of the Dick and Jane "see Spot run" line of books -- which, spawned in the 1930s, seemed old-fashioned just a couple of decades later -- to the businesslike earnestness of the Hardy Boys and the casual racism of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" series.