Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who gently coached anxious postwar parents to trust their ''own common sense,'' only to be blamed by some critics for the self-indulgence of those parents' children, the 60's generation, died on Sunday at his home in San Diego. He was 94.

Over half a century, Dr. Spock's homey handbook on child care, now titled ''Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care,'' became one of the best sellers of all time. Therese Zazycki, a spokeswoman for Pocket Books, its main publisher, said yesterday that almost 50 million copies have been sold around the world, translated into 42 languages.

Dr. Spock also became well known as an antiwar demonstrator in the 1960's, as he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and against the war in Vietnam and was arrested in protest demonstrations. ''There's no point in raising children if they're going to be burned alive,'' was how he made the connection between parents, pediatricians and politics.

Dr. Spock had already broken with authority in his child-rearing handbook, which he saw as giving ''practical application'' to the ideas propounded by two early 20th-century sages, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator.

''John Dewey and Freud said that kids don't have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will,'' he observed in 1972.

And so in the opening chapter of the book, first published in hardcover in 1946 with the title ''The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,'' Dr. Spock counseled his readers not to ''take too seriously all that the neighbors say.''

''Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense,'' he wrote. ''What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best.''

Such relaxed advice, given in the easy, practical, reassuring way that he had with parents, was light-years from the stern dictums of earlier standard works, like the 1928 book ''Psychological Care of Infant and Child'' by Dr. John B. Watson. ''Never, never kiss your child,'' Dr. Watson commanded. ''Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.''

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of the Harvard Medical School, another noted pediatrician-author, once said of Dr. Spock: ''Before he came along, advice to parents was very didactic. He opened the whole area of empowered parenting. He gave parents choices and encouraged them to think things out for themselves.''

Dr. Spock repeatedly revised his own book over the years, and, for the fifth and sixth editions, which appeared in 1985 and 1992 respectively, he had a co-author: Dr. Michael B. Rothenberg, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Washington's medical school. Dr. Spock said in an interview in early 1992, when he was 88, that he planned to stay involved in updating the book ''as long as I live.''

Ms. Zazycki of Pocket Books said that, as scheduled, the seventh edition of the book will be published, in mass market paperback and trade paperback versions, on May 2, which would have been the doctor's 95th birthday. Tracey Guest, a spokeswoman for the publishing house Dutton, said yesterday that Dutton will publish a hard-cover version of the seventh edition of Dr. Spock's book on July 1.

That new edition is by Dr. Spock and a new co-author, Dr. Steven J. Parker, who is a Boston pediatrician. He was the lead author of a study, published in 1992 in the journal Pediatrics, which found that women with one aspect of the Type A personality -- loosely identified as a hard-driving nature -- tend to have babies who exhibit Type A temperaments.

Dr. Spock's literary agent, Robert Lescher, said late in 1997 that Dr. Spock was ''very deeply involved'' in preparing the seventh edition.

Altogether, the doctor was the author or a co-author of 13 books. He was also a prolific author of magazine columns for more than 30 years. He wrote columns about raising children for Redbook and Ladies Home Journal and, more recently, for Parenting magazine.

From Pediatrics To Politics

In the 1960's and 1970's, Dr. Spock's views on child-rearing were sometimes blamed for the disorderliness of young people, many of whose parents had been devotees of his book.

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew blamed the doctor for what Mr. Agnew called the undue permissiveness abroad in the land.

It was in the 1960's that Dr. Spock became an antiwar activist and opponent of the draft, nuclear armaments and the United States's involvement in Vietnam. He was a co-chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, known as SANE, from 1962 to 1967. He also underwent what he called a ''conversion to socialism.''

The doctor was arrested at various protest demonstrations. In 1968 a Boston court convicted him of conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft. He was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $5,000, but the conviction was reversed in 1969 by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on the ground of insufficient evidence.

In 1972 Dr. Spock was the Presidential candidate of the People's Party, a coalition of left-wing organizations. His platform called for free medical care, the legalization of abortion and marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income for families and the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from foreign countries.

In 1976 he was the party's candidate for Vice President, and in the late 1970's he was also prominent in anti-nuclear demonstrations. By the time he turned 80, in 1985, he had been arrested a dozen times for civil disobedience, but he did not stop. In 1987, he and others were arrested and charged with trespassing after demonstrating at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station against the test launching of a Trident 2 missile.

The Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the author of ''The Power of Positive Thinking'' and a critic of Dr. Spock, saw it differently. He said the doctor had gone ''out in the streets with these babies raised according to his books, demonstrating with them for things they claim we should not deny them.''

Dr. Peale said the doctor's views amounted to: ''Feed 'em whenever they want, never let them cry, satisfy their every desire.''

Spock Interprets Spock on Babies

Dr. Spock said that Dr. Peale, Mr. Agnew and other critics had distorted what he had written. ''I didn't want to encourage permissiveness, but rather to relax rigidity,'' he once observed. ''Every once in a while, somebody would say to me, 'There's a perfectly horrible child down the block whose mother tells everybody that he's being brought up entirely by your book.' But my own children were raised strictly, to be polite and considerate. I guess people read into the book what they wanted to.''

On another occasion, striking a different note, he said: ''Maybe my book helped a generation not to be intimidated by adulthood. When I was young, I was always made to assume that I was wrong. Now young people think they might be right and stand up to authority.''

The doctor's own political activism deterred some people from buying his book. In an interview in 1992, he reported: ''The sale of the book was depressed a great deal during the Vietnam period. It has gradually crept back up.'' And Dr. Edward F. Zigler, a child psychologist on the Yale University faculty, said in the same year that there were still ''people today who mistrust his book because of his position on social issues.''

Dr. Spock also came in for criticism from the women's movement. He was denounced for what were called sexist passages in his writing, one of which objected to women ''acting more and more like men.''

Gloria Steinem once told him that she hoped he understood that he was considered a symbol of repression, like Freud and other male supremacists.

In 1971, noting the feminist criticism, he wrote: ''I agree today that a man has no business trying to tell women what their characteristics are, which ones are inborn, which are more admirable, which will be best utilized by what occupations.''

In talking about himself, Dr. Spock understandably referred now and then to his own starchy upbringing in New Haven. Once, in the 1960's, he said that in his life he had ''tried hard to rebel, to be pleasure-seeking,'' but that his political dissent had been based on stern moral considerations that his Yankee parents would have approved of.

From Need to Help, An Urge to Doctor

Benjamin McLane Spock was born May 2, 1903 in New Haven. He was the eldest of the six children -- four girls and two boys -- of Benjamin Ives Spock, a railroad lawyer who was conservative in his politics, and Mildred Louise Stoughton Spock. The Spocks were descended from early Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley; the family name was originally Spaak.

After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., Dr. Spock entered Yale College, where he majored in English, minored in history and, as he recalled years later, ''gravitated toward medical school without any real decision.''

Six feet 4 inches tall and broad-shouldered, he was, literally and figuratively, a big man on campus, a member of the Yale crew that won in the Paris Olympics in 1924.

''I had an awfully good time at college,'' he recalled years later. He also worked summers in a home for crippled children. ''I guess that's why I became a baby doctor, thinking of those kids,'' he said later. ''My doctoring was always vaguely humanitarian.''

After earning a B.A. in 1925, he studied at the Yale Medical School from 1925 to 1927, and then transferred to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and earned his M.D. in 1929, after being at the head of his class at the end of the last two years.

He interned at Presbyterian Hospital in New York and was a resident in pediatrics at the New York Nursery and Child's Hospital.

''Sometime during the pediatric residency years (1931-1932)'' Dr. Spock wrote years later, ''I conceived the idea that someone going into pediatrics should have psychological training.'' And so he also spent 10 months as a resident in psychiatry at New York Hospital, and he went on to part-time training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from 1933 to 1938.

A Warm Charmer With Children

In 1933 he also opened his pediatric practice and after a couple of lean years it began to flourish. His success was partly the result of his charm, warmth and vitality. ''All the young mothers had a great crush on him,'' a former patient said years later. ''He was a gay and charming man.''

Another reason he did well was that, as the product of a large and happy family, he took great pleasure in being with his little patients. He once said, ''One of my faults as a pediatrician has always been that I whoop it up too much with children.''

His success was also the result in part of his concern for the feelings of his patients and their parents. He wore ordinary business suits, rather than white doctor's coats, to make his visitors feel more relaxed.

Describing Dr. Spock's child-side manner, another writer on child care, Dr. Milton Levine, recalled later, ''I used to hear parents and even doctors talk about him as 'the man with the gentle face and eyes.' ''

In addition to his private practice, Dr. Spock served, early in his career, as an instructor in pediatrics at Cornell Medical College, an assistant attending pediatrician at New York Hospital and a consultant to the New York City Health Department.

He also was the part-time school doctor at the Brearley School on East 83d Street, a private school for girls from kindergarten through the 12th grade. At the school, Lynn Z. Bloom wrote in her 1972 book, ''Dr. Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical'': ''He realized that the perceptive teachers could see each child in the context of the whole class and so understand her in a way the pediatrician never could. The perspective he gained at Brearley was to be drawn upon at length in his later writings for parents.''

In 1943, ten years after the birth of his first son, Michael, Dr. Spock began three years of writing ''The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.'' He spent countless evenings dictating it to his first wife, the former Jane Davenport Cheney, who typed it up as he went along and assisted in many other ways. Dictating the book helped to give it the conversational tone that was one of its great attractions.

Dr. Spock joined the Navy in 1944 and kept on writing in his spare time while working as a psychiatrist in military hospitals in New York and California. He left the Navy, with the rank of lieutenant commander, in 1946.

The doctor took enormous pains with the book and even worked on its original index during a slow troop-train journey from New York to California. To make things as convenient as possible for readers, he made sure the index included such common-sensical entries as ''Bedtime -- keeping it happy.''

In the 1972 interview, Dr. Spock said he had undertaken the book ''as a departure from conventional wisdom.'' ''It wasn't radical, though it struck out in new directions,'' he said.

A New Perspective On Raising Children

Taking a longer look backward, in the 1992 interview, the doctor ascribed much of his professional success to his own psychoanalytic training in the 1930's. In that period, he said, it was highly unusual for an American pediatrician to have that kind of training. ''For the first 10 years I was in practice, before I wrote the book,'' he said, ''I was trying desperately to reconcile Freudian concepts with what mothers told me about their babies.''

In the book, Dr. Spock wrote that it was unnecessary for a mother to stick to a rigid feeding schedule for her baby and that it hurt a mother emotionally to have to wait for a fixed feeding time while her baby wailed.

But he also stipulated: ''This is not an argument against reasonable regularity. I do not think it is harmful for a baby or a mother to work toward a schedule. The mother has to run the rest of her household and when the baby is ready to fit in, it will help everybody.''

On the question of how to cope with crying, Dr. Spock took a balanced view: ''I don't think it's good to let a baby cry miserably for long periods if there's a way to comfort him, not because it will do him any physical harm but because of what it might do to his and his mother's spirits.

''The child, he wrote, ''needs to feel that his mother and father, however agreeable, still have their own rights, know how to be firm, won't let him be unreasonable or rude.'' And he added, ''The spoiled child is not a happy creature even in his own home.''

From Book's Success, A Frightened Author

In retrospect, it seemed almost inevitable that the book would become an enormous success, appearing as it did when the post-World War II baby boom was under way, and the winds of change were stirring in the baby and child care field. Even Dr. Spock's flinty Yankee mother is said to have observed, after reading the book, ''Why Benny, it's really quite sensible.''

But the doctor said in the 1992 interview that he was frightened when 750,000 copies were sold in its first year. ''I was scared that the book would be misunderstood,'' he said, ''that somebody, thinking she was following my advice, would do something that would make a child worse, or even kill a child.''

In its first six years the book sold more than four million copies, and the languages it was eventually translated into included Urdu, Thai and Tamil. Duell, Sloan & Pearce published the original hard-cover edition.

Pocket Books, which had persuaded Dr. Spock to write the book, brought it out in paperback with the title, ''The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care,'' which later became simply ''Baby and Child Care'' and then ''Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care.'' That is the title of the hard-cover and paperback versions of the current, sixth edition, which came out in 1992.

Dr. Spock's earnings from the book were widely thought to have made him a millionaire. In the early 1990's, they were about $150,000 a year.

As time passed, he watched for new developments and insights that might require him to revise parts of his book. He recalled years later that when he returned briefly to his private pediatric practice in New York after the war, ''I began to see examples of a going-to-bed sleep problem in infants that I had never seen before: a baby would object to being put to bed in the evening, and his mother would keep picking him up.

''If she was a type who could be progressively intimidated, her baby could turn into a tyrant in six months. He could not only learn to stay awake until 10 or 11 o'clock at night but demand that his exhausted mother carry him around in her arms.''

Dr. Spock took that problem into account in 1954, when he began to prepare revisions. As he put it later, ''I wrote that more mothers got into difficulty from being afraid to give firm leadership than from being too rigid. And I put more emphasis on the rights of parents, on the need for firm parental leadership, and on my conviction that firmness makes for not only better-behaved children but for happier ones.''

Changing of Guard In Child Authorities

After giving up his New York practice in 1947, Dr. Spock was affiliated with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and went on to serve as professor of child development at the University of Pittsburgh from 1951 to 1955 and at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland from 1955 to 1967, when he retired from teaching.

Over the next years, he kept active ''writing articles and books, keeping up with correspondence, going out on frequent speaking tours,'' he wrote in a 1989 volume of memoirs, ''Spock on Spock.''

He continued to make changes in his baby and child care book, and the fourth edition in 1976 was revised largely, as he said in a preface, ''to eliminate the sexist biases of the sort that help to create and perpetuate discrimination against girls and women.''

One change was to refer to the baby and child as ''she'' as well as ''he.'' Another was in descriptions of the parents' roles.

''I always assumed that the parent taking the greater share of young children (and of the home) would be the mother, whether or not she wanted an outside career,'' he said in the preface.

''Yet it's this almost universal assumption that leads to women feeling a much greater compulsion than men to sacrifice a part of their careers in order that the children will be well cared for,'' he went on. ''Now I recognize that the father's responsibility is as great as the mother's.''

By early 1990, when Dr. Spock was 86, the 71-year-old Dr. Brazelton, who tirelessly addressed parents' groups, had become the country's most visible contemporary authority on raising babies and young children. And Dr. Penelope Leach, a British psychologist-author, had also joined the top echelon of experts to whom new parents were turning for advice. But Dr. Spock remained one of the most widely read authorities on child-rearing.

In 1976, the year that the fourth edition of his baby and child care book came out, he was divorced from his first wife, Jane, whom he married in 1927. In an interview shortly before the divorce, she noted that he had dedicated the latest revision of the book to her and that he had acknowledged that she had given him much help in writing it. ''Feminist groups landed on him like a ton of bricks because they thought his book was sexist,'' Jane Spock said, ''So in the process of taking sexism out of his book, he did this dedication to me."

She said she should have been considered the co-author of the book, and then, as she put it, ''I would have been asked on television shows, too, and I would have been asked what I thought about things. I might have been more of a somebody. But I don't think he could stand it, sharing the spotlight. You know how people are.''

Later in 1976, Dr. Spock was married to Mary Morgan, whom he met through her work arranging conferences for professionals. ''Spock on Spock,'' subtitled ''a Memoir of Growing Up With the Century,'' was written in collaboration with her.

In an interview in 1994, soon after Dr. Spock's 91st birthday, Ms. Morgan said his good health and longevity stemmed from his life style, which still included rowing. In those days he began each day with an hour's meditation, 30 minutes of yoga, a shiatsu massage, a hot sesame oil massage and a macrobiotic breakfast of brown rice, miso soup and vegetables. Nonetheless, he said at the time, ''It surprised me very much to find I got to be 91.''

In an interview last month, Ms. Morgan said that she and her husband lived on a budget of roughly $100,000 a year, but that their savings had been depleted by 24-hour nursing and by other kinds of care for the doctor, who came down with pneumonia six times last year and had been in declining health. She had decided to appeal for assistance from friends by means of a letter-writing campaign and through fund-raising parties at the time of the publication of the next edition of the baby and child care book.

Dr. Spock had two sons from his first marriage, and they did not comment about her appeal. But Ms. Morgan said the family was divided over whether the doctor should enter a nursing home, which would cost less. His home care in January, 1998 cost over $16,000 -- which was largely not covered by Medicare and private insurance.

''They wanted to put him in a nursing home and I wouldn't do it,'' she said, ''And I said I will stay beside him till the day I die.'' She said their income had dwindled by half because the baby and child care book's sales had fallen off since people were waiting for the next edition. Last month, Gina Centrello, the president of Pocket Books, said they had decided to help pay his medical bills.

In addition to his wife, Ms. Morgan, Dr. Spock is survived by two sons, Michael of Illinois and John of California; a stepdaughter, Ginger Davison of Tennessee; four grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; and two sisters, Sally Jordy of Rhode Island and Marjorie Spock of Maine.

In 1994 Dr. Spock expressed some very mixed views about child-rearing in his book ''A Better World for Our Children: Rebuilding American Family Values.'' ''When I look at our society and think of the millions of children exposed every day to its harmful effects, I am near despair,'' he wrote. He bemoaned ''the progressive loss of values in this century'' and ''the fact that our present society is simply not working.''

But he added a hopeful note. ''Of course we cannot return to the 'good old days,' '' he said, ''But we can bring back some of those traditional family values and stability. Our greatest hope is to bring up children inspired by their opportunities for being helpful and loving.''

Benjamin Spock (1903)