Dr. Harvey Karp - Happiest Baby/Toddler on the Block

There was a lecture at the UMHS today by Dr. Harvey Karp on how to calm babies and how to communicate with toddlers.

I read his books while on my pediatrics rotation. He is impressive in his claims and his use of scientific reasoning. In particular at his talk today he gave a number of research literature references from prominent pediatrics journals. In time I will get to review these papers. For now, I will say that the one idea I did not like in The Happiest Toddler on the Block is the invocation of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", which has been shown to be--at least in the original form proposed by Haeckel--false.

Overall however I like his ideas, particularly regarding calming babies. He places our current practice of parenting in the historical context of American medicine and compares against parenting in other cultures--some of which have no concept of infant colic. He also makes a good argument that being able to effectively calm babies is crucial for the health of the baby and the mother (in terms of shaken-baby syndrome, post-partum depression, martital discord, etc). I actually tried some of his techniques during my pediatrics rotation, without much success. Today during the talk however a baby sitting in the back would not stop crying, and Dr. Karp demonstrated--live--his "5 S's" and indeed calmed the baby down in seconds. These techniques were similarly effective in the DVD clips he showed during the talk. Impressive.

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