2012 Book Review #82: The Happiest Baby on the Block

[jethrien]

Title: The Happiest Baby on the Block
Author: Harvey Karp
Genre: Parenting guide
Thingummies: 4?

Synopsis: With the thesis that colic is essentially a result of humans being born too early (so our heads can get out without killing our mothers), Karp has what he considers a fool-proof method of recreating the comfort of the womb and calming even the fussiest of babies.

Thoughts: Well, the final evaluation is going to have to wait for a few months until I have someone to try the technique out on. But the book came very highly recommended, both from mothers I personally know and from various experts whose opinions I respect, so we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt for now. His theories, as he lays them out, certainly do make sense, and jive up well with information I have from other sources. (Although there's plenty of theories in every generation that subsequently seem ridiculous, so I've got a certain amount of cynicism.)

The advice he gives--calm a baby by imitating the environment the kid started in, by combining swaddling, loud shushing sounds, jiggling, side/stomach positioning, and sucking--is pretty straightforward. It doesn't require expensive equipment, can apparently be mastered with just a little practice, and does not ask parents for the ridiculous efforts some of the other trendy parenting methods demand.

Annoyingly, this is one of the most repetitive books I've read in some time. I'm not sure if he doesn't trust parents to get ideas the first time around (or the fifth), or whether he knew he had enough info to write a nice magazine article, and then padded like crazy to fill out a (still fairly slim) book.

However, if it actually works as promised, I suspect I'd cheerily be willing to pay 200x the cover price and read a law student's worth of textbooks to get the effect to work and get some darn sleep. So I'm going to withhold any more judgements until I can actually put this one into practice.

(Why am I reading this so early? Because I figure I better get my reading done now. I don't think the kid's going to sit still waiting for me to read a couple chapters before I figure out how to calm him down, once he's out in the cold, bright world.)

Comments

[momerath4.livejournal.com]

I had colic as a baby. My mom blames herself for eating super spicy food at her first meal home from the hospital. No idea if there's any truth to it, though I've heard food-based explanations elsewhere. She dealt with me by basically having my grandmother live with us for the first several months and they would alternate who would stay up with me and who got to sleep. :-/

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I find the idea that she made one bad food choice and suffered for months kind of hard to believe. I think it's more likely that you were just colicky and there wasn't anything she could have done. At least in this book, he makes some good arguments against the idea that it's digestive based--apparently the correlation doesn't actually match up, age-wise. Ages when colicky babies are cranky and are having digestive issues overlap, but digestive issues often extend farther than the colic, so they don't think one actually causes the other.

And plenty of cultures eat lots of spicy food all the time, while we (who have relatively bland food) have one of the highest rates of colic. (I also read somewhere that babies' ability to taste spiciness isn't present at birth and actually develops awhile in. If that's right, you couldn't have even been aware of the spiciness.)

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Your poor mom, though. How awful to be sitting up with an inconsolable baby and be convinced that it was your fault just for eating the wrong thing!