Harvey Karp

[lucindapie]

A friend sent me a link to a youtube video of Harvey Karp demonstrating his five s's.

is it just me or is this just incredibly disturbing? The baby is not crying, but check out it's wide eyes, it looks scared if you ask me. I think it's too scared to cry. I think if you wrapped me up so I couldn't move then rocked me in a weird position making a strange sound in my ear, and shoving a dummy in my mouth, I would be too scared to object to!
I read a lot about crying before having DD and how evening crying is the natural way for a baby to release stress and tension, (tears release cortisol the stress hormone) after the scary experience of being born, so Harvey Karp has stopped the crying, but she doesn't look very happy to me! I think also swaddling has been linked to hip displasia.
btw the image of poor Maya in the vid was in my mind as I fell asleep making me feel sad about all the babies that's parents have followed this method, so dont watch if you think it will freak you out I just felt so sorry for them, it's like she s being treated like an object to control rather than a human being,

and isnt shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh just a passive aggressive way of saying shut the up?

I understand what you're saying, but my dd refused to sleep from about month 2 and would scream for hours. This system was the only thing that could help her to sleep.
People will probably flame me and say that babies will always fall asleep on their own. Go check out the high need threads with that view and see how far you get.
Dr Harvey saved my sanity and gave my dd the sleep she desperately needed. Fact.

Didn't Tracey Hogg do the 3 S's?
Or someone else?
Not actually new is it?

It's not new but it does make a lot of sense and works well. You need to read his book to get whole story- the video is just a short version. Basically the premise is you need to help newborns by mimicking the womb environment to turn on their soothing reflux

None of it is particularly new or unique but I like the way Karp bases it on rl experience .

And Karp has 5s (but a certain over lap to baby whisperer)

Reflex not reflux

hey silly beardy, I'm glad you had something to save your sanity, and help your daughter sleep, I don't think parents should be given a hard time for doing what they need to get through the day I feel like this sort of method would be okay if your baby had been crying for hours, and you needed some respite, but to use it reguarly I dont think is right,
I read aware baby by aletha solter, babies need to cry to release their tensions so when DD had her crying spells i would hold her, look at her, and not try to distract her from the crying she needed to do I would talk to her, baby tell her I was sorry the birth had been hard etc etc, sounds a bit silly I know but I was treating her like a human being that needed to shut the up! When i didn't distract her from crying she would get it out of her system, and the sleep very well, without needing to put her to sleep, the trouble with all these methods to put the baby to sleep, is they build up tension so next time it will be even harder to get your baby to sleep.

I think it's a very gentle way to soothe your baby and tbh if you're only going on a youtube video rather than the book, I don't think you'd "get" it. The shhshh noise is to mimic womb sounds - that's hardly aggressive is it? As is the swaddling.

lucinda at the point I discovered Harvey karp my dd had been screaming her head off for 5 hours. She hadn't slept and was refusing to feed during this time. She'd been awake for a while before that too. The 5s' finally got her to sleep when all other methods failed. We'd even tried controlled crying during that time (allowing baby a chance to get out the frustrations of the day)!

Being awake for so long isn't right for a baby and crying for 5 hours definitely isn't.

Dd fell asleep within minutes of starting the 5s' so I've got no problems with it.

hey igggi i listened to a talk by Harvey Karp, so understand principles behind it, and I am not sure I agree. A bit of white noise can't take away the fact that the baby has been born, it has sight which it didn't have in the womb. also smells are different (aside from mothers breasts)
i know that karp claims 5's work cos its like the womb but i think that baby has stopped crying because its frightened,, also its wide eyed taking in its new surroundings and then some ''''qualified'' childcare expert is basuically giving the message 'pretend its not happening you are still in the womb'''

silly beard -- by controlled crying do you mean leaving baby alone to cry? that is not what i was advocating, i mean holding baby while they are crying as leaving baby alone will just make the crying worse and does not allow them to get out their tensions

Tried both to no avail, holding and leaving. Didn't help that dd has an extreme moro reflex too that kept waking her prior to the screaming problem kicking off. The combination of swaddling shushing etc was the only thing that could get her off to sleep for ages.

I really don't think that the baby in the clip is too scared to cry - if a baby is scared it certainly will cry, and loudly! I thought that baby looked fairly relaxed. Anyway, I'm not sure what is new about all this - I was given Karp's book when I had DD1 (who is now 7). I didn't really look at it then, but when I had DD2 two years later I remember looking back and reading it and thinking how helpful and intuitive his 5 S's were - they were pretty much all the things that I had done naturally with DD1 to get her calm and off to sleep (without having read the book) and after reading his book I definitely incorporated his ideas further into calming DD2 and later DS with a lot of success.

Is that 'needing to release tensions' argument not suspiciously similar to 'they need to exercise their lungs'?

Babies mostly cry when they are upset. Sometimes it's more serious than others, but still, they are upset. Making them not-upset would seem like a logical and sensible thing to do.

Little babies cannot possibly process a message like 'pretend it's not happening' as you suggest; they simply respond to an experience that makes them feel secure. Why on earth should you think this is a bad thing?

this blog post sums up what I was trying to say!

www.regardingbaby.org/2012/05/05/is-the-happiest-baby-on-the-block-the-most-oppressed-why-im-not-a-fan-of-the-5-s-method-of-calming-crying-babies/

I think that blog post is an egregious example of projecting adult thoughts and emotions onto a tiny baby whose emotional and psychological functioning operates completely differently. I think it's also a total misreading of the way in which techniques like Harvey Karp's work - the argument is badly conceived, and rather self-indulgent. Apologies if the blog post's your own - it just doesn't work at all, in my opinion.

no not my own, so no offence taken! Where did you get the idea that babies have a complete different emotional and psychological functioning? Just curious since they are human after all! Crying as a healing mechanism for adults and chilldren/babies, is a known phenomenon, tears contain cortisol, the stress hormone so when we cry, (provided we cry in the loving presence of someone else NOT alone)we wash stress out of our bodies , the same is true for adults and children.

yeah, and thinking about what the blog said, i think the point is she's trying to say that a baby is a human, that's why he/she should be treated with some respect and a listening here, rather than being treated like an object whose job it is to shut up, which is basically what Harvey Karp is doing! Babies are a lot more intelligent, and human like than most people give them credit for.

oh one more thing, a cry is a form of communication, our job is to fufill the need, eg hungry, tired, too hot, too cold,
but if the crying is about 'nothing,' ie colicy type crying, our job is to listen not to make the baby stop communicating,