Many (like, at least five!) friends who are also Parents of Babies recommended this book to me when they learned of my delicate condition: “This book is the only one that actually helped!” So obviously I picked it up. Baby Luxury is still in utero, so I’ll have to report back in December when I can tell y’all if the advice in this book works on an actual baby.
Basically, Dr. Karp posits that particularly fussy (colicky) babies simply don’t have the skills yet to self-soothe. They just can’t handle all this stimulation–and everything is stimulating. Life is hard when you are new to literally all the things.
So, he says, the best way to calm babies like this is with his Five S strategy: swaddle, side/stomach, shhh, swinging, sucking. The combination of these techniques makes babies feel like they are back in the womb, when life was good, giving them a “fourth trimester” to finish their development and work on their life skills. This book goes into detail, with illustrations, about how to do these five steps for the sleep and sanity of your whole family.
Here’s the problem: Amazon says the paperback version of this book has 267 pages. That’s about 250 pages too many.
This book is incredibly padded. Some sections are repeated verbatim…multiple times. Once in a while there might be a new nugget of information, but there is really no reason that the page count should be in the triple digits. It could have been a well-written 10 pager, and that’s including illustrations. With anecdotes, maybe 20 pages. In short, dude needs an editor. My advice: watch the video, read the website, or skim the book at the library (preferably when you don’t have a crying baby with you.)
Rating: 2/5 for editing/writing quality.
Rating on content withheld til I can apply it to an actual baby.
I think you’ll love the 5 S strategy (I never read the book, everyone just kept telling me what to do when I was freaking out, and it worked). You will also love, “Let the baby sleep in the carseat/swing/jumper, whatever the heck works” method when you get really tired. Congratulations!
Yea! I’m glad I know the strategy (but also glad to know that “whatever the heck works” is also a good strategy). I just wish Dr. Karp was as good at editing as he is at calming babies down, you know?
There’s a 20 or 30 minute DVD version that I would recommend checking out because the material itself is GREAT but it only takes as long as a sitcom. The material in this book SAVED OUR SANITY.
So I debated leaving a comment on this because I’m kinda (?) a peer of Dr. Karp (yes we’ve met multiple times) and I’m knee-deep in writing my own book which will be a direct competitor to Karps other book – Happiest Baby Guide to Sleep. I can’t disagree with your assessment of padding, but because Karp has done more for parents of newborn than any single person on the planet I refuse to say an unkind word about him or his work ;)
On a personal note, I’m also struggling with being repetitive. What I’ve found is that parents read all these books before the baby shows up, then everything is forgotten (<-not hyperbole) the second that 7 lb muffin shows up and you're back skimming the books trying to figure out how to handle the screaming and non-sleeping (true for about 60%). I'm failing to find a good balance of avoiding repetition vs. "what if they only read this chapter?" Like I've covered this in huge detail in a previous chapter, but if you scanned the index and jumped in on chapter 8 you wouldn't have that knowledge which is important in the context of Y.
TL:DR – making baby sleep books that are pithy and lack repetition is more challenging than it might sound at first glance :P Mine will be going out for beta readers this summer, let me know if you want to point out how repetitive I am, I'm always open for more beta readers. PS. You can check out my whole baby sleep empire (HA) here: http://www.troublesometots.com
Awesome website. I wish I could go back in time to when my first kid was a baby — your site would have come in handy when she screamed and screamed every night until she threw up, knowing that THEN we would come in and take care of her. She was a wily one. We got her to stop with a method made up of our favorite Karp/Weisbluth/Ferber bits all mashed together.
Yea, I thought about this as I was reading, actually. I see the value of repetition, especially in books like this where you’re trying to get a specific message across to people who want/need answers, and I’m sympathetic to it. I mean, I definitely know the 5 S strategy now, and it’s more likely that I’ll remember it in 4 months. So that’s good, and valuable!
But if we’re talking about sheer book-reading experience, it’s just not enjoyable when whole sentences or sections are repeated multiple times, you know? It doesn’t help me remember it; in fact, I’m more likely to skim because yup, already read that. And it is actually more difficult to find the parts of the book that I want to review, or that one nugget of new information, because there’s so much extra padding to sift through. (Hence my title–I wouldn’t turn to this book if I were desperate to find information quickly. But I *would* turn to his website!)
That said, still glad I read it! And I’ll definitely read your site too over the next few months, too!
I’m not sure if this is helpful or not, but I found it interesting: premature babies don’t get colic until they’re past their due date point, and then some of them do mysteriously get colic until they’re about three months old. Colic is just a thing that some babies have and some don’t. (I hope yours doesn’t, colic is nasty on new parents.) Whilst I’m sure the womb can and does help many babies and parents, there are going to be some who it just doesn’t work for.
My sister tried loads of things to get her baby to sleep for longer than 1.5hours and to stop spitting up all the time. My niece ended up on reflux medicine for 6 months or so, which solved the spitting up problem, and she finally started being able to get herself back to sleep. When she was 2. Some kids are just awkward little buggers. It gets better, or at least, sleep deprivation eventually damages your brain enough that you stop noticing how bad it is. *helpful*
Baby Ellen is arriving in December… does this mean I need to start reading parenting books? Because I am not prepared to do that! Can’t I just make it up as I go along?
Call me and we can figure it out together! :) Congrats on Baby Ellen!
Well congrats on Baby Luxury! And this will definitely need to figured out over phone chats and wine! (when I can drink wine again…)