The pediatrician and entrepreneur Harvey Karp is the most famous baby calmer in the world. To new parents, he is something between a sage and a magician, offering insight into the opaque miseries and motivations of the tiny humans newly entrusted to their care. In his multi-decade career as a public figure, across books, videos, blog posts, television appearances, and a baby-sleep-tracking app, Karp projects the affable confidence of a person who knows that he knows more than you do, but is awfully excited to bring you into the light. In 2002, after decades of pediatric practice in Los Angeles, he published the book “The Happiest Baby on the Block,” in which he lays out his “Five S’s” technique (swaddle, side-stomach position, shush, swing, and suck) for soothing infant crying and guiding them to restful sleep. The book has sold in the millions—late last year, when I had a baby, I received no fewer than three copies as gifts, with notes instructing me that it would save my sanity, my physical health, and my marriage. Even parents who haven’t turned directly to Karp for guidance are, to some degree, living in his world: many of his infant-care teachings—including the “Five S’s,” the idea of babies having a “calming reflex,” and the notion that newborns and birthing parents experience a “fourth trimester” after delivery—have become fundamental to the way that infancy is understood in America today. (Karp readily admits that these ideas are not original: swaddling, for example, a technique nearly as old as humanity, had largely fallen out of fashion in European and North American parenting until Karp helped to revive it.)
After the success of “The Happiest Baby on the Block” (and its sequel, which focusses on caring for toddlers), Karp made the jump from media to retail. “What I came to realize,” he told me recently, “is that educating millions and millions of parents every year is a really a hard job.” He began to envision a device that could help parents put his techniques into practice. That device, launched in 2016, was Snoo—just Snoo, no definite article, like a given name—a sleek, ovoid bassinet that rocks and plays white noise at graduated levels in response to a baby’s cries. With its special anchored swaddle, it is, essentially, the physical manifestation of three of Karp’s “Five S’s” (four, if you pop a pacifier in the baby’s mouth). The fifth and missing “S,” “side-stomach position,” is effective for calming an unhappy baby who is awake, but is considered unsafe for sleep. (In late March, the F.D.A. authorized the Snoo bassinet as a medical device, based on its intent to effectively keep babies on their back when sleeping, a position that reduces the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS.) The device has skeptics, in large part because of its cost: currently, a Snoo runs sixteen hundred and ninety-five dollars to buy outright, or about a hundred and fifty dollars a month to rent—figures that are arguably at odds with the universal urgency of safe infant sleep. Happiest Baby, Inc., has also been subject to criticism, with a recent Insider investigation painting a picture of a poorly managed workplace where staffers received insufficient training. (“A hatchet job,” Karp said, when I brought up the report.) Still, Snoo’s devotees are passionate and legion. Parenting forums and group chats overflow with odes to the bassinet’s ability to coax hours of extra sleep out of finicky babies using its tech replication of motherly rocking and shushing, and to soothe parental anxieties about infant safety. It seems like every famous person who has had a child in the past seven years has a Snoo in their nursery; allegedly, Beyoncé and Jay-Z own eight.
Karp is seventy-one years old, with a goatee and a boyish flop of chestnut hair. He is retired from medical practice, but remains a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and is also the C.E.O. of Happiest Baby. He spoke to me, over Zoom, from his home in Los Angeles, about the perils of excessive individualism, the moralization of baby sleep, and why “robot” shouldn’t be a dirty word. (Our interviews have been edited for length and clarity.) At the beginning of our conversation, just as we were getting down to business, he briefly turned the interview around on me.
You yourself are a mom, right?
I am! I had a baby a few months ago.
Do you feel different? Do you feel like it’s been transformative, or do you feel like it’s in the flow of your life?
A little bit of both? I was nervous about having my identity subsumed into parenthood. But, so far, I feel very much like myself—and also I happen to have a baby, which is really nice.
Do you feel like yourself-plus?
That’s a nice way to put it.
That gives me some good context. Thanks.
What kind of context does it give you?
Well, that you are part of the demographic that is interested in this stuff. There’s a science side to this, but there is also a reality-of-life, a sociological point of view that I think having a young child gives you access to. It’s kind of like how, when you walk into a supermarket, if you don’t have a dog, you have no idea where the dog food is. So having an awareness of this parallel slice of life, I think, does give different insights.
Do you think people who aren’t parents ought to be interested in what it’s like to raise a child?
There’s kind of a general fascination with babies—perhaps less so in men, maybe, than in women, but babies are a cute part of the world that we’re in, so I would imagine people have at least a passing interest in the subject. Over all, the baby is an iconic member of our society. And, of course, they are our progeny. They are the next generation that’s going to take care of us. More and more, really, there’s the issue of recognizing that the family is the cultural foundation of the nation. Nations around the world are recognizing, from a demographic point of view, that family relations are a key part of your cultural underpinnings. The birth rate, which we always took for granted, turns out to be important! The future of your nation is dependent upon it being peopled! Throughout the history of humanity, this wasn’t really a concern. After World War Two, you had to repopulate Europe, so to speak, and there was a big emphasis on that. But, for the most part, people had babies, and now, for some reason, people are choosing not to or are delaying having babies.
Is the reason for the declining birth rate really an open question? It seems to me as if there are some pretty clear reasons why it might be slowing down.
It’s complex. Cavemen lived in dangerous times, but they had a lot of babies. Of course, they didn’t have a choice in the matter. They didn’t have birth control, and, for the most part, they couldn’t control that. We now have choice. We have a lot of things distracting us. The list is long. Having a baby is on the list, but there’s also a biological imperative—did you feel that? Did you feel like there was a voice inside of you?
Not at all. But I also didn’t feel negative about it—some people know very clearly, for any number of reasons, that they absolutely do not want to be a parent, but that wasn’t me. I was pretty straightforwardly ambivalent. And now I’m obsessed with my baby. I think she’s the coolest person who’s ever existed.
Sometimes you have a baby and you go, “Oh, my God, I’m just instantly in love. I never knew it could be like this.” Sometimes it isn’t, and you’re, like, “Well, this is nice.” It takes time to fall in love, or to build a relationship. A lot of people do judge themselves if they’re not instantly in love with their baby, but sometimes that relationship takes time to blossom—especially for men. Because you’re used to having a relationship with a someone, and babies don’t become a someone, sometimes, for a number of months. But it’s still faster than you can believe—it’s already happening. The baby is being aware, being reactive, being responsive, following your smile, following your taking turns and talking. These things emerge that signal that this is really a person that you’re having a social relationship with. Sometimes you’re on the river, but it just takes a little time to drift your way through.
Did becoming a father change the way that you thought about this baby-parent relationship?
Well, no. I’m a stepfather; I never had my own biological child. I practiced pediatrics for ten years or so before I got remarried, and my daughter came into my life, and she was seven years old at the time.
So you haven’t lived with a newborn extensively?
That is kind of a funny thing, isn’t it? Maybe I’m a little bit like a priest. I’ve taken care of so many babies, but haven’t exactly had that lived experience. When I became a stepparent, I had already counselled thousands and thousands of parents, so I had some pretty clear ideas. My daughter has her own personality and temperament, and they say that an expert is an authority in their field outside of their own house. So I get plenty of challenges, but it’s a wonderful thing to really participate in the most intimate way in someone’s life, the ups and downs. As a doctor, you’re a voyeur in people’s lives—you are episodically present during severe illness and whatnot, but not on this every-single-day basis. I don’t think my philosophy’s changed at all, but my appreciation for effort has—I’ve learned that it’s harder to carry out things than it is to tell people to carry out things. If you’re doing it right fifty per cent of the time, you’re really successful.
What made you interested in baby sleep, as a subject?
I’ve always been interested in unsolved problems. From 1979 to 1980, between residency and doing a fellowship, I spent a year in pediatric practice. At that time, we would give crying babies burp drops to ease their stomach pain, because the concept we were working with was that babies cry because they have stomach pain, or they have gas. Even the word “colic”—the way we refer to uncontrollable crying—comes from the same ancient Greek root as “colon.” When I went to U.C.L.A. to study child development, I had to do a research project, and I figured I would demonstrate exactly how burp drops reduce crying. At that time, the definition of colic, which had originated in the nineteen-fifties, was the rule of threes: a baby who cried for at least three hours a day, three days a week, for more than three weeks. That’s how we defined colic—but what is colic? It started really making sense to me that, in babies, crying wasn’t actually related to stomach pain, or acid reflux, even though millions of babies were being put on medicine for acid reflux. I learned about the !Kung people, in southern Africa, who could calm their babies much more effectively than Americans could. At the same time, I was working on the child-abuse team, and I was seeing babies who were injured by their parents, some who were literally shaken to death, because their parents couldn’t handle their crying. I became fascinated by this question: How do you calm crying? That kind of led me down the rabbit hole.
