The baby whisperer

By Alison Hewitt

UCLA Professor Harvey Karp saw lots of squalling babies as a pediatrician, and like anyone, he wanted to calm both the infants and everyone else's nerves. Where Karp differs from most people is that he succeeded.

Karp found what he calls an "off-switch" for the colicky shrieking that drives parents to desperation. "At a lecture during my child development fellowship at UCLA, I learned about the !Kung San tribe — the exclamation mark is a click sound," he said. "I learned that they could calm their babies in under a minute. It was clear to me that if they could do it, we could."

He researched child development and how cultures from around the world treat newborns, and he learned to think of babies' first three months of life as "the fourth trimester," a time when infants crave the noises and sensations of the womb. The uterus isn't a sensory-deprivation chamber, Karp emphasizes. Fetuses hear the roaring sound of their mothers' blood rushing around them, feel the pressure of the womb hugging them, and are accustomed to the bouncing motion of their mothers' moving around.

Faced with a loudly shrieking infant, Karp demonstrates the power of the calming reflex in this noisy clip from his video, The Happiest Baby on the Block.

"There are some extremely fundamental ideas we have about babies that are completely wrong — for example, that babies are over-stimulated and need to be in a calm, quiet place," Karp says. "They need stimulation."

Read the complete story in UCLA Magazine Online.