Happiest Baby on the Block Review

Happiest Baby on the Block
by Dr. Harvey Karp

Another useful DVD, I notice it has a book too, but I would think that something like this I would like to see live action demonstrating. Dr. Harvey uses what he calls the 5 S's to calm down the crying babies. The 5 S's, which are swaddling, side/stomach position, shushing sound, swinging, and sucking triggers the babies's natural reflexes to calm down. In his DVD he demonstrates how to use the 5 S's. Compared with Dunstan Baby Language, I still rate Dunstan's higher, even though they kind of address different issues, I find the 5 S's to be more of a temporary relief, if there is an underlying problem, you will still need to fix it before your baby will stop crying, unless the issue was the baby was sleepy. So I find using the 5 S's with the combo of Dunstan Baby Language the best. The 5 S's again have an age limit around 9 months max, I think I read this on a forumn before, once you reach around that age, the 5 S's just don't work anymore. With Dunstan Baby Language, it is often very hard for the untrained ears, like ours, to be able to quickly identify the issue before the baby cry escalated to just pure screaming, then at that point, you need the 5 S's.  5 S's calms the baby down enough to give you the second chance of identifying their cries. However, often times I do find the technique to be hard to apply, especially since I don't have enough experience like Dr. Harvey. Swaddling and holding the baby side ways to an exact correct angle is very difficult for me, and yes, it has to be an exact angle for it to work on my daughter. But I often just resort to the shushing, I do worry about my daughter's ear drum though, the shushing does seem really loud to be that close to the ears, but with a screaming baby, I guess I don't have much choice, I did end up just getting a sound track of rain and playing it super loud. It got me through a lot of hard times.