Tricks of the Trade

Calming and Sleeping Secrets From Dr. Harvey Karp

By Teri Brown

When Mary Lebeau first watched Dr. Harvey Karp on ABC's Good Morning America, she was a bit skeptical. She'd always swaddled her infants, but felt some of Karp's other baby calming methods were just plain odd.

"The shushing seems a bit off the mark, on the surface," says Lebeau, mother of five from West Deptford, N.J. "After all, wouldn't saying shush firmly in a child's ear keep her awake? But as I learned from reading further about Dr. Karp's techniques, shush is quite like the sound babies hear in the womb, so it comforts them to hear it."

"I've found it works wonders in lulling Libby to sleep," Lebeau says of her youngest child. "I wish I had known about Dr. Karp back when my other children were tiny!"

Dr. Harvey Karp has created quite a stir in the world of pediatrics. While many pediatricians believe that Dr. Karp's methods aren't all that new or revolutionary (swaddling has been around for as long as babies), most give Dr. Karp a nod for putting the methods all together into one cohesive system.

Dr. Karp's book and DVD, The Happiest Baby on the Block (Bantam Doubleday Dell, 2002), have helped parents everywhere do what parents since the beginning of time have wanted to do: calm a screaming baby. Dr. Karp puts forth an interesting theory that makes sense to those of us who have held a helpless newborn infant: Babies are born three months too soon!

Dr. Karp notes in his book that the newborns of many other creatures are far more suited to survival than our infants are. Human newborns are far more like fetuses than they are babies.

"This idea was briefly discussed in a book from the 1970s known as The Continuum Concept

Want to see more?

• Songs to Soothe Your Baby
• The Crying Game: Soothing Your Newborn
• Helping your Colicky Baby
• Talk about it!