We were thrilled to shine a spotlight on one of Founding Board Members and a driving force behind the work of Healthy Child Healthy World, Dr. Harvey Karp.  

Dr. Karp has been a practicing pediatrician and child development specialist for 30 years.  He is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine in Los Angeles and has committed his full-time efforts to writing, lecturing and education.  He has been a spokesperson on children’s environmental health for the American Academy of Pediatrics, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the California Department of Health Services, and the California Medical Association. His best-selling books, The Happiest Baby on the Block and The Happiest Toddler on the Block, have made him one of America’s most read pediatrician.

There’s a reason why The New York Times celebrated his contribution to modern parenting by saying, "Roll over Dr. Spock!"  Take a look at this great video (shown at our event) highlighting Dr. Karp’s work and impact:

The Happiest Baby on the Block book and DVD solve the 3,000-year-old medical mystery, “What is colic?” and reveal Dr. Karp’s discovery of the "calming reflex", a virtual crying off-switch babies are born with. This reflex soothes most fussy babies in minutes and can boosts sleep by 1-3 hours per night!  And calmer babies equal calmer, more confident parents.  His method is taught in hospitals, health departments, and military bases across the country by thousands of specially trained educators.

Dr. Karp’s follow-up book and DVD, The Happiest Toddler on the Block, are among the most used toddler parenting guides in the country. They teach parents of children 8 months to 5 years of age a surprisingly more effective toddler communication approach that can rapidly boost a toddler’s patience, cooperation and reduce outbursts and tantrums.  

Its impossible to overstate Dr. Karp’s influence on the work of Healthy Child and his inordinate assistance to the cause.  He continues to inspire us all.  In his own words:

"John Muir, the great American naturalist, said that if you reach out and tug on a tiny piece of nature, you’ll discover that everything is connected to everything else. And because of this great connection, we often blunder into doing harm. “Oops, we’re sorry we polluted your river for the next 100 years!”…“Oops, we didn’t know the chemical we were using caused cancer!” These unintended consequences are especially worrisome for our children because early life experiences and exposures influence whether or not they will grow up to have healthy and happy lives. We’ve changed the world before and now, for the sake of our children, it’s time to do it again.  And, as a bonus, your thoughtful example will nurture in your children your deep values, respect for nature, and the desire to make the world better."

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Those days are gone.

Starting in 1946, a whole generation of baby boomers were raised on advice from the avuncular pediatrician, whose book “Baby and Child Care” sold nearly 750,000 copies the first year alone — without advertising. But ask Jonah Davenport, father of a 2-year old, if he’s ever read Dr. Spock, and the Washington, D.C., resident can scarcely stifle a guffaw.

“Naah,” says Mr. Davenport, 38, an early childhood education teacher.

He is seconded, somewhat, by Tricia Flock, 36, of McCandless.

“I’ve heard of him,” the mother of a 2-year-old and a 4-month-old says of Dr. Spock, “but I didn’t think he was for me. He sounded as though he’d be somewhat outdated.”

What about Penelope Leach and T. Berry Brazelton, the popular parenting authorities of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s? “I’m afraid not,” she said.

All three still have books in print — a revised edition of Dr. Spock’s tome is coming out in 2011, and his legacy lives on in The Dr. Spock Co. and its Web site, Drspock.com. But his influence, and that of Drs. Leach and Brazelton, has clearly faded as a new generation of parents grapples with the age-old questions of how to soothe a baby’s crying, whether to bottle feed or breast-feed and how to handle tantrums.

If anything, it’s the era of Too Much Information, a lot of it conflicting — and not just from the hundreds of books, Web sites and even cell phone applications that distract restless toddlers. A recent New York Times piece highlighted the burgeoning popularity among parents of dog trainer Cesar Millan, a.k.a. “the dog whisperer” — use dog training concepts to raise your kid — and Time magazine’s Nov. 20 cover story focused on “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting” with the pendulum swinging toward “slow parenting” and other less fraught ways of bringing up baby.

“Some days I think I’m doing everything right, and some days I have no clue,” said Ms. Flock, who notes that at a bimonthly gathering of preschool mothers at Northway Community Church, “we talk a lot about what we should or should not be doing. Should you do baby sign language or not? Should we spank or not spank? There are just so many people out there saying you should do this, you should do that, it makes you really nervous sometimes.”

Who’s to blame for this cacophony of confusion? Who else but baby boomers, driven, obsessed, hungry for information about their-children-as-projects, even as mothers flooded the workplace and families moved around the country, cutting themselves off from relatives and longtime neighbors who would have been an extra pair of hands or a soothing voice in times of stress.

“One of the big shifts in the last generation was the atomization of the nuclear family, which means we are cut off from age old wisdom of mums and grandparents to tap into,” notes Carl Honoré author of 2004’s “In Praise of Slowness,” and of a new book “Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting.”

And if anything, he contends, the books that promise to fill that void end up making parents even more unsettled.

“I’m not against advice, it’s useful to have it, but we’ve become advice junkies,” Mr. Honoré said in an interview from his London home, “constantly searching for the guru of the day and the expert of the moment before deciding what to do, rather than looking at our own experiences and relying on the people around us.”

Anxiety over child rearing has been with us since the dawn of the industrial age, writes Ann Hulbert in her 2003 book “Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children.” The pendulum, she adds, has always swung from chilly to warm and fuzzy: In the 1920s and ’30s, behavioral scientist John Broadus Watson warned parents not to hug their children too much; Dr. Spock told postwar parents not only to hug them, but to “trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

As late last century’s culture wars intensified, child-rearing became almost politicized, with attachment-parenting-bonding guru William Sears on one end of the spectrum and strict disciplinarians John Rosemond and James Dobson on the other.

The notion of one omniscient voice, however, seems as last century as Walter Cronkite.

“I couldn’t really say which books are most popular among my friends. They all read different things. I also really like two Web sites — but I can’t remember their names,” added Christine Liberati, 32, of Ben Avon, with a laugh. Ms. Liberati, the mother of a 6-month-old, relied on “What to Expect the First Year,” by Heidi Murkoff, which leads the Barnes & Noble list in the infant and toddler category.

The rising rock star these days, however, seems to be Dr. Harvey Karp, a Los Angeles pediatrician and author of “The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer.” After his book came out in 2002, devotees (Madonna, Pierce Brosnan among others) dubbed him the “baby whisperer” because of his ability to calm a screaming infant by administering the “Five S’s”: swaddling, positioning the baby on his stomach or side, making shushing sounds similar to those in utero, swinging the baby and having him suck on a pacifier or breast.

Today, Dr. Karp is the go-to guru for parents in much the same way Drs. Spock, Brazelton or Leach once were. But while Dr. Brazelton’s “Touchpoints” focused on a child’s emotional development and Dr. Leach’s “Your Baby and Child” with the minutiae of daily child rearing, Dr. Karp’s book is about a single idea: If you can sooth a crying baby, the rest will flow from there, making a parent’s job easier.

He links baby crying and parental fatigue to a host of ills, from postpartum depression, breast-feeding failure, sudden infant death syndrome, shaken baby syndrome and child abuse.

For the typically overprotective, perennially worried, “helicopter” parent, his message resonates.

“It gave me something as a father to do,” said Mr. Davenport, the early childhood education teacher in Washington, who is a big fan of the book.

“There were these five mechanical steps that you follow in a pretty particular way, and they worked. Plus the information jibed with my understanding of child development.”

Dr. Karp says his method comes as a relief to parents, who today are as project-driven as their baby boomer moms and dads were. “It’s ‘do this and this and this and you will succeed,’ ” he said in a phone interview from his Los Angeles office. “People today don’t have the support network they once had, and there’s this myth that they’re supposed to automatically know how to do it without that extended family support. Parents need to cut themselves some slack.”

Dr. Karp’s fan base is largely the professional, well-educated, middle-to- upper-middle-class demographic, but his methods are being taught by childhood educators and lactation consultants to low-income mothers who might otherwise not have the time or resources to seek out his books or other trendy tomes on child rearing.

In Pennsylvania in 2007, Dr. Karp was brought in to train 250 staffers in the Women Infants and Children program, who in turn teach their clients his methods because it increases the duration of breast-feeding. “If the infant was fussy, mothers would think they weren’t getting enough to eat,” noted Wanda Godar, a spokeswoman for the state’s Bureau of Family Health, which administers the program. “This definitely helps.”

The state’s Department of Public Welfare has also funded a pilot project in Fayette County, one of the poorest in the state, where nurses pay home visits to at-risk pregnant women and new mothers, using his DVD and a portable DVD player.

“Our babies don’t cry as much, and the parents don’t become as upset,” said Janet Debolt, director of the county’s Nurse-Family Partnership.

Dr. Todd Wolynn, a pediatrician based in Pleasant Hills and Squirrel Hill, is teaching Dr. Karp’s methods to his patients and to expectant mothers at West Penn Hospital. He’s hopeful the five “S’s” will catch on across the socioeconomic spectrum — much in the way that Dr. Spock appealed to a broad range of Americans.

“People 40 and over know Dr. Spock, and those under that age probably don’t,” Dr. Wolynn said. “Harvey has a great thing going.”

Even so, new fashions in parenting will continue to unfold, and new experts will recycle old ideas to new parents. In fact, the backlash against over parenting, touted as “news” in Time, actually began brewing back in 1990, when the term “helicopter parent” was first coined by pediatrician Foster W. Cline.

Ultimately, parents struggle to either emulate their own upbringing, or reject it, asserts Mr. Davenport.

“No matter what we read, when we get stressed, we’re going to parent the way we were parented,” he said. “We know that in our bones, because it was what we experienced.”

Roots of World War II traced to 1905 Far East voyage.

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• How the baby books rank, see Page A-14.

Within days of being born, babies cry in a way that reflects the language spoken by their parents.

In a study of French and German newborns, researchers with the Max Planck Society in Germany found clear differences in the tone and pitch of the babies’ cries. The French babies started low in pitch and then went higher, while the German ones did the opposite, starting high and then falling lower. According to the researchers, those modulations reflect the melody patterns typical of fluent speakers of each language.

According to Angela Friederici, one of the authors of the study, which was recently published in the journal Current Biology, babies in the last trimester of development in utero respond to noise and can sense the mother’s voice. “The sense of hearing is the first sensory system that develops,” she said, but because amniotic fluid muffles sounds, “what gets through are primarily the melodies and intonation of the respective language.”

In French, she said, a lot of words have the stress at the end, so that the intonation rises, while German is mostly the opposite. She added that “our results generalize to other languages with a clear stress pattern.

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Now don’t get me wrong, as parents we often have to reassure our children and help them through their frustrations and disappointments, BUT save your reassurance for after you respectfully reflect your toddler’s feelings (try the “Fast Food Technique,” described on The Happiest Toddler DVD and book). Once your toddler starts calming down, and actually starts to feel okay, that’s when she will really appreciate you saying, “It’s okay.”

Of course, if your toddler is in pain or terrified, you should immediately step in to help. But remember: Toddlers aren’t delicate flowers who need to be protected from all frustration. Challenging situations can actually strengthen your toddler’s character and resilience. As Wendy Mogel says in her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, a child’s struggles have a valuable silver lining – they boost her ability to handle life’s inevitable frustrations.

Farmers have to plow before they can plant, and parents need to reflect their toddler’s feelings (and wait for them to start settling) before taking a turn.

In a similar way, don’t come in too fast with trying to distract your child in the middle of her tantrum. Like reassurance, distraction is great – but only after your child starts to regain her calm.

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Verbal attacks can scar like knives, wiping out a hundred hugs and triggering feelings of worthlessness. An angry or disgusted tone of voice is something that even a 1 year old finds hurtful, but actual “name-calling” becomes increasingly damaging to toddlers around two years of age because middle toddlers are superfocused on words and care a lot about what others think.

Remember, like an ambassador, you are building a long-term relationship. Can you picture a diplomat telling a king, “You’re so stupid!” or “Shut up!”? Diplomats keep a cool head and a respectful tone even when they’re mad, because they know that today’s enemy is tomorrow’s friend. So when something your toddler does makes you really upset, skip the yelling and names and instead tell him how his actions made you feel: “You broke my favorite picture frame, and Mommy is mad, mad, mad!”

Fortunately, compliments and kind remarks also live long in our minds. So here are some tips on how to replace mean labels that tear your toddler down with descriptions that build him up. It’s one of the best gifts you can give. Time to play a game I like to call “Reframe That Name!” See if you can replace each of the “labels that hurt” with one of the “descriptions that help”.

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1) When an infant poops, (s)he must relax the anus first. This can be hard for a young baby, and many accidentally clench both at the same time so they are “pushing against a closed door.” They’re confused! Babies have to figure out how to poop while lying flat on their backs. Just think of the trouble you’d have using the restroom in that position.

So in essence, babies grunt and cry when they poop because they’re working so hard to overcome these two challenges – not because they’re suffering from colic.

Nevertheless, grandma’s advice is still true: “It’s important to stay regular.” Fortunately, breast-fed babies are almost never constipated. Bottle-fed babies, on the other hand, do get constipated, but several commonsense approaches can usually help correct the problem:

• Change the formula – Try switching from concentrated formula to powder, or vice versa. Some babies are better with cow’s milk formula versus soy, too.
• Dilute the mix – Add one ounce of water or half an ounce of adult prune juice (organic is best), once or twice a day, directly to the formula.
• Open the door – Try getting your baby’s anus to “loosen up” by bicycling her legs and massaging her bottom.

Healthy babies may skip a day or two between poops. However, less frequent BM’s may signal a more worrisome problem, like hypothyroidism or infantile botulism. If your baby goes more than two or three days without a stool (or sooner if s/he is acting ill, irritable or lethargic) , it is important to talk to your doctor.

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The 5 techniques offered in The Happiest Baby book and DVD are often effective on their own for soothing a mildly fussy baby. And, in combination they are super-effective in switching on the calming reflex…even for newborns with colic. These steps, which I call “The 5 S’s,” are so useful at making unhappy babies feel cozy and calm that one of my patients dubbed it “The Cuddle Cure.”

If calming a baby were like a cake, each of the 5 “S’s” would be one of its layers. Here’s why:

Swaddling is the most important first step of calming (and the first layer in this comfort cake). I know some babies struggle when they first get wrapped, but don’t give up. It is much, much easier to soothe a baby (and keep her soothed) if she is snugly wrapped – arms down. Next is the Side/Stomach position. Then add a layer of “Shhhh,” followed immediately by Swinging. Then, last but not least, Sucking is the icing on the cake!

The final product is a very specific mix of tight wrapping, jiggly rocking, and loud shushing that provides the comforting stimulation that your little one is dreaming of. When parents who are dealing with colic tackle this issue using the “Cuddle Cure,” they’re astonished by the results. It’s my sincere hope that once this knowledge becomes common knowledge, colic will eventually be a something that’s found only in dictionaries.

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By the late 1970s, however, these approaches were called into question. Sedating babies was considered inappropriate. Doctors stopped using anti-spasm medicines on babies with colic after several infants lapsed into comas and died. And anti-gas drops lost their appeal when research proved them no more effective for curing colic than water.

Although I’m grateful to have received an excellent medical education, I felt helpless when it came to caring for newborns with colic. It was shocking to learn that our sophisticated medical system still didn’t offer a single effective solution for the common – yet terribly disturbing – problem of colic.

So I began to research colic, determined to unearth every clue to explain why so many children were plagued by this mysterious condition, and I soon uncovered two facts that turned my alarm into hope:

1) I learned about the profound differences between the brain of a three-month-old baby and that of a newborn. A brilliant paper published by preeminent pediatrician Dr. Arthur H. Parmelee, Jr. in 1977 described how sophisticated and complex the brains of babies become over the first months of life. Dr. Parmelee powerfully demonstrated the massive developmental leap babies make during the first three months of life – and also the gap between how parents expect babies to look and act and their true behavior and nature.

2) While studying at UCLA, I was shocked to learn that colic is virtually absent in the babies of several cultures around the world. It dawned on me that our culture, while advanced in so many ways, was quite backward when it came to understanding the needs of babies. Once I realized that our ideas about colic were build on centuries of myth and misconception, the solution became crystal clear.

With The Happiest Baby On The Block book and DVD, I invite you to learn how your baby experiences the world, offering extremely effective techniques that I’ve used to calm thousands of patients over the last twenty years. Parents around the world have successfully used these methods to soothe their babies…and I hope that soon you will, too!

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Raising a toddler is one of the joyous high points of parenthood. There’s nothing like a one-, two-, or three-year-old to help you see the world in wonderful new way: the bugs in the grass . . . the shapes in the clouds . . . the “castles” in a pile of sand. Toddlers brim with curiosity, excitement, and irresistible charm.

But as every parent with a toddler knows, the emotional climate can shift quickly. One minute all is bliss. Then BAM! They cry, scream, and erupt into a tantrum (often in the most embarrassing places). No wonder hundred of books written on the subject attempt to teach parents how to get their toddlers to behave. Fortunately, the use of harsh physical punishment as a parenting tool has been largely phased-out and replaced with a gentler, more loving approach. But unfortunately, patient explanations and respectful words often flop when it comes to soothing toddlers with tantrums.

Over the next few years, one of your top parental jobs will be to civilize your toddler: teaching him to say “please” and “thank you,” to wait his turn, and to pee in the potty. At the start of my career, I learned that, when it came to this “civilization” process, the obvious techniques of distraction (“Hey, look at this toy!”) and empathy (“I know you hate shots, but…”) often just bounce right off of fussy toddlers. That’s when it dawned on me: Toddlers don’t think like older kids . . . so why speak to them like older kids?

When toddlers get upset, the brain center that controls language, logic, and patience literally shuts down. No wonder they transform into impatient and irrational Conan the Barbarians! I tested out a new theory, and began speaking to my cranky toddler patients in a simpler, more primitive language (think Tarzan, or Bamm-Bamm from The Flintsones). I was amazed to discover that I could often soothe their tantrum – and even get a few smiles – in less than one minute!

In The Happiest Toddler on the Block DVD and book, I teach a series of highly-effective methods to boost patience, cooperation and respect in children from 8 months of age to 5 years. You’ll be pleased to see how quickly you can improve your toddler’s behavior and stop tantrums before they begin. Before you know it you’ll have less yelling, more cooperation, and a happier, more loving time for you and your toddler!

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I’ve read reports of the !Kung newborn care with great interest because their infants hardly ever cry! It’s not that they never cry – it’s that they never CRY! (And I know you understand the distinction.) !Kung infants get upset as often as our babies do, but their parents are so skilled that their babies’ fussing bouts average only sixteen seconds in duration – and over 90% end in under a minute. For parents struggling with colic in our culture, this sounds too good to be true.

What the !Kung secret? What ancient wisdom do that know that we have forgotten? I believe this tribe’s stunning success is based on three main factors:

1. Constant holding
2. Immediate responding
3. Very frequent breastfeeding

Although the !Kung have few material possessions, they have the luxury of having lots of cuddle time with their babies. !Kung mothers carry their babies all day long in leather slings and sleep next to them at night. This closeness makes it easy to soothe fussiness right from the start, to keep it from building up into full-on colic.

Since !Kung parents spend so much time close to their babies, it’s easy for them to comfort their babies’ cries quickly – usually within ten seconds!

In addition to holding and cuddling, the !Kung calm their babies by putting extra emphasis on breastfeeding. They give quick little feedings 3-4 times an hour. That’s 50-100 times a day!

We in the West might think that all this lavish and immediate attention would spoil a baby, but that’s not the case. !Kung children generally grow up to be happy, independent, and well-adjusted.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we adopt all the !Kung ways – but by studying their successful parenting practices, Western moms and dads can glean some helpful tips – especially for parents dealing with poor infant sleep, excessive infant crying, and colic.

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Few parents across the globe lay infants flat on their backs to sleep, and they usually put them on a curved surface, not a flat one. The mild arc of a small blanket suspended from a tree or tripod cuddles a baby in the softly-rounded fetal position, which helps activate the calming reflex and promotes more peaceful infant sleep.

The Lapp people of Greenland carry their babies curled up in cradles that hang on one side of a reindeer (counterbalanced on the animal’s other side by a heavy sack of flour.

The !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert carry their infants in leather slings all day long. They keep them in a partially-rounded (semi-sitting) position, which they believe encourages a baby’s development.

In parts of Indonesia, loving mothers never let their babies stretch out completely; to them it is too reminiscent of the position of the dead. Infants, compactly bundled and suspended from the ceiling in a seated position, sleep like little floating Buddhas. (Even new mothers are advised to sleep sitting for forty days after delivery to ward off evil spirits who are believed to be attracted to people weakened by illness or injury.)

The Efé pygmies in Zaire don’t put their babies down – even for a moment. They keep their tiny tots happy by holding them in their arms all day long, and all night, too. Sicne it’s such a big effort for one person to manage all this carrying, the Efé rely on teamwork. For the first several months, moms pass their newborns back and forth – an average of eight time an hour – among up to twenty close tribal members!

Even when women in different cultures begin to let their infants out o ftheir arms, they usually hang them over their laps, backs or chests, thus allowing the baby’s soft tummy to keep in constant contact with their mother’s warm, comforting skin.

The Side/Stomach position is a cornerstone of The Happiest Baby approach. When used properly, these methods can quickly soothe fussing and crying, calming even most cases of colic!

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