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.
