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Loading... The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your…by Harvey Karp
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Well, I don't have the kid yet, so I can't give it 5 stars. However it seems like it'll work, the book is well written and easy to understand. The "jiggling" concept might be hard for me to do, though. (  ) vfranklyn | Nov 10, 2009 |  Our little girl isn't colicky, but we do employ the techniques described in this book when she fusses, and they do calm her. At times, especially the beginning, it seems like the author is trying too hard to sell his theory about colic. I found the second half of the book to be more informative and helpful than the first. If you can make it through the initial sales pitch, you will find the rest of the book to be very insightful. ( ) echoesofstars | Oct 18, 2009 | Review of The Happiest Baby on the Block and The Happiest Toddler on the Block. He 'discovered' the infant calming reflex. Karp 'discovered' the toddler approach. Oh please! He named things (rocking babies, swaddling, saying shush; talking to toddlers on their level) and made a brand. I might note that his claims to have 'discovered' what has been known and practiced by most of the world for most of human history eerily echo the claims of many other 'discoverers' of lands and knowledge possessed only by natives, women, and other non-important people. Oh, and also? In Happiest Toddler his whole premise is based on the idea that 'toddlers are little cavepeople', and he has articulated it by assigning stages of human evolution to stages of infancy. This, he tells us, is based on the scientific principle that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' -- apparently, his genius was to see that toddlers are still developing! So they are ontologizing too! or something. Anyway Haeckel's recapitulation theory is wrong. It seems intuitive to people first learning about development and/or evolution, but it was refuted numerous times in the 20th century. One would have hoped that in the years Karp claims to have spent researching anthropology, biology, and so forth, he would have come across some of the literature actually discussing why it was wrong, and why educational vogues based on these ideas a hundred years ago are also wrong. And his artfully posed author picture kills me. Never mind. If you can get beyond the lame theorizing, and the pompous gasbaggery (carefully disguised in a patronizingly playful tone), and the painful politics of white male professionals claiming to have 'discovered' historical parenting techniques -- if you can get past all that, then there are some nuggets in the books. For the most part these nuggets can be garnered by skimming through the book in half an hour. The videos are more useful, as they show actual parent-child interactions. In summary: Check out of the library; do not buy. (  ) lquilter | Sep 27, 2009 | Good book with solid concrete tips that worked well for our two babies. The downside is that this is 40 pages worth of material expanded, and expanded, and expanded, upon in order to get a commercially viable link. -- Find the 5 "S"s, read them and then you're done. (  ) ArcticLlama | Sep 20, 2009 | This is the one "must-read" even if you read no other books for new parents. I have recommended this to many first time parents and every one of them has come back to say thanks. The concepts are pretty simple, so simple they seem obvious once you read them but they make a huge difference. The techniques, the 5-S's described in other reviews, are simple and so easy to use that it's easy to say think "I didn't need them" but in retrospect they become ingrained. (  ) BrauerFamily | Apr 4, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400)
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