When Mary Lebeau first watched Dr. Harvey Karp on ABC's Good Morning America, she was a bit skeptical. She'd always swaddled her infants, but felt some of Karp's other baby calming methods were just plain odd.

"The shushing seems a bit off the mark, on the surface," says Lebeau, mother of five from West Deptford, N.J. "After all, wouldn't saying shush firmly in a child's ear keep her awake? But as I learned from reading further about Dr. Karp's techniques, shush is quite like the sound babies hear in the womb, so it comforts them to hear it."

"I've found it works wonders in lulling Libby to sleep,” Lebeau says of her youngest child. “I wish I had known about Dr. Karp back when my other children were tiny!"

Sleep Theory
Dr. Harvey Karp has created quite a stir in the world of pediatrics. While many pediatricians believe that Dr. Karp's methods aren't all that new or revolutionary (swaddling has been around for as long as babies), most give Dr. Karp a nod for putting the methods all together into one cohesive system.

Dr. Karp's book and DVD, The Happiest Baby on the Block (Bantam Doubleday Dell, 2002), have helped parents everywhere do what parents since the beginning of time have wanted to do: calm a screaming baby. Dr. Karp puts forth an interesting theory that makes sense to those of us who have held a helpless newborn infant: Babies are born three months too soon!

Dr. Karp notes in his book that the newborns of many other creatures are far more suited to survival than our infants are. Human newborns are far more like fetuses than they are babies.

"This idea was briefly discussed in a book from the 1970s known as The Continuum Concept (Perseus Publishing, 1986)," says Dr. Karp. "However, people who work with babies have long had this idea, because they seem so immature at birth. My work was further supported by the research done by my mentor, Dr. Arthur Parmelee Jr., showing the exact immaturities of the brain and how they quickly mature over the first three months."

Waive the Eviction
Dr. Karp loves this concept because it makes it so much clearer to new parents what their job is. It isn't to train their babies or make them learn to be independent. If we are evicting our babies before they are really ready for the world, we need to provide them with a warm, nurturing atmosphere that is as similar to their in utero world as possible.

"Inside [the womb] they get constant holding, rocking, and the noise is louder than a vacuum," says Dr. Karp. "Then suddenly they are born and it is quiet and still … and we try to make it even quieter! They are missing all the rhythmic, entrancing stimulation of the womb! So even if you hold, rock and shush 12 hours a day (which seems like a lot to us), to Baby it is already a 50-percent cutback … it's a rip-off! This is upsetting to all babies, but to some it is positively crazy making!"

Man on a Mission
Dr. Karp's mission to help parents and their babies began years ago when he began his pediatric studies in the early 1970s. During his years at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he was taught that babies scream because of gas pains, and there were only two valid approaches for soothing these unhappy infants.

First, was holding, rocking and pacifiers. If that failed, the second way was to use medicine like sedatives, anti-spasm medicines (to treat stomach cramps) and anti-gas drops. By the late 1970s, however, these three "solutions" were either abandoned or seriously called into question.

After studying pediatrics for three years at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, he was fully trained as a baby doctor, yet still couldn't help distraught parents relieve their babies' most common problem: crying.

"Although my education was excellent, I felt helpless when it came to caring for frantic newborns," says Dr. Karp. "In 1980, as a fellow in child development at the UCLA School of Medicine, my frustration turned into shock and alarm. There, as a member of the Child Abuse Team, I consulted on several severely injured babies whose screams drove their stressed-out parents to commit horrible acts of abuse."

According to Dr. Karp, one out of every five babies has frequent bouts of screaming for no apparent reason. That means a whole lot of babies who suffer from hours of red-faced, eyes-clenched screaming!

A New York City-based study showed 91 percent of parents with a colicky baby experience severe marital problems. In fact, a baby's cry is the No. 1 reported trigger of shaken baby syndrome. "This is why the parents of unhappy, yet healthy, babies are such heroes," says Dr. Karp. "A baby's scream is one of the most heart wrenching sounds on earth. Despite being bone-tired and bewildered, these moms and dads cuddle their frantic babies for hours, gently trying to calm them despite their pounding hearts, sweating palms and stomachs that are all tied up in knots."

Colic Redefined
Determined to unearth whatever clues he could as to why so many children were plagued by colic, he read everything he could on the subject. He soon uncovered something that began to put everything into focus for him and turn his alarm into hope.

"There were some tribes around the world where babies never cried more than a minute," says Dr. Karp. "These babies weren't different from ours, but the parents were doing something that really worked."

He spent the next 20 years researching and refining, making dozens of house calls and gradually organized the information into what has become the five "S’s”:

• Swaddling
• Side or Stomach position
• Shushing
• Swinging
• Sucking

These five techniques, in different combinations, seem like miracles for tired parents, and that is exactly what Dr. Karp enjoys about his job: helping parents enjoy happy, healthy babies. "I get to be a physician dealing with the cutting edge issues of medicine and also like a village elder passing on the ancient wisdom," says Dr. Karp. "And I am welcomed into the most private experiences of a family at some of the most sacred times: from the birth of a baby to the birth of an adult.”

Want to see more?

• Helping your Colicky Baby
• The Crying Game: Soothing Your Newborn
• Songs to Soothe Your Baby
• Talk about it!