Meteoric success

Harvey Karp, BA ’72, always knew that he would become a physician. What he could not foresee was how his practice and research would impact so many parents and children around the world. The pediatrician's books and accompanying DVDs, The Happiest Baby on the Block and The Happiest Toddler on the Block, are among the top-selling parenting publications in the U.S., and have been translated into more than 13 languages. The publications’ meteoric success has also changed Karp's life: the child care expert lectures around the globe and has appeared on numerous television shows, including Good Morning America and The Dr. Phil Show.

Responsibility to a larger cause

A native of New York City, Karp majored in biological sciences at UB. He recalls Professor Gordon Swartz, who was "inspiring, had a great sense of humor and a lot of respect for his students." (In fact, Karp thanks his former professor in the acknowledgements of his latest book.) Outside the classroom Karp was a member of the fencing team and the chorus, and he says that singing The Messiah at Kleinhans Music Hall "was one of the high points of my time at UB."

Karp credits the university with launching his humanistic career: "UB gave me a broad taste of life in so many different directions. It enriched my way of understanding how people connect together in the world. I was at UB during the Vietnam War and was one of the organizers of the strike that closed the school down after the 1970 student killings in Kent, Ohio. It was a time of terrible turmoil in the nation. There was a lot of discussion at UB about what was right and what was wrong. We felt that we really had responsibility not just to ourselves, but to a larger cause."

The calming reflex

Karp received his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and he chose pediatrics after working with children in a South Bronx hospital. "These inner-city kids had such a spirit of life, and such a joy, that I decided if I was going to be working with sick people, it would be a wonderful life to be able to work with kids who had that energy and hopefulness," he says.

Karp moved to California for his residency and then opened a private practice there. Despite his extensive medical background, he went on to UCLA to study child development. One of his primary research questions became something that may sound simple to the uninitiated: How parents can deal with a crying baby. "At UCLA I was a member of the child abuse team," he says. "I saw children who were injured by parents who were good parents, but who were pushed over the edge by their child’s crying. At that time we were taught to tell the parents that sometimes children would just cry for hours and there was nothing you could do about it. Then I attended a lecture where I learned about a tribe in Africa where parents could calm their babies in under a minute."

For the next several years Karp researched the calming techniques of other cultures, then refined and practiced these techniques with his young patients. "What I discovered is that all babies are born with an 'off switch' for crying, called the calming reflex. The best way to understand newborns is that they were born three months too soon, and that they needed a fourth trimester of care. When using those techniques I was able to calm virtually any baby within minutes." Karp's innovative techniques are outlined in his book, The Happiest Baby on the Block, and illustrated in the DVD of the same name.

Karp proudly points out that his techniques have been adopted by child abuse programs and programs for at-risk parents. Recently he started a program to teach these calming techniques to new parents in hospitals, so, Karp says, "they can learn how to be the parents they want to be. I have a lot of hope that these techniques will not only help parents be better parents, but that they will prevent some serious complications, such as Shaken Baby Syndrome and postpartum depression, which are both linked to crying babies."

In 2003 Karp published The Happiest Toddler on the Block book and DVD, which he says, "conceptually redefine our understanding of young children." The basis of the book is a principle that Karp learned from Gordon Swartz at UB: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," which means that the development of a person through his or her lifetime, from embryo to adult, echoes the evolution of the species. Karp explains, "That has been known for 150 years, but what has never been done before is to show how a 1-year-old is like the missing link from 5 million years ago; a 2-year-old is like early homo sapiens from 150,000 years ago; and a 3-year-old is like a cave dweller from 50,000 years ago, painting on cave walls. Understanding that allows you to be much more effective with young children."

Building bonds

An assistant professor of pediatrics at UCLA School of Medicine, Karp is in private practice in Santa Monica, where he lives with his wife and daughter. In his down time Karp loves to river raft, kayak and hike. This summer he is working on a new medical book about the first year of life. Despite the overwhelming success of his books and DVDs, his celebrity patients, and the national media exposure, Karp maintains that the most gratifying part of his career is "to sit in a room with a family and be able to counsel parents who are in a difficult situation, and be able to build a bond with a young child." 

Visit Karp's website.

Written by Jessica Dudek, BA '94
May 2005