Tame your toddler
IN an hour, my two daughters, Evelyn (three-and-a-half) and Isabel (two), have run the gamut of emotion: shy giggles, overexcited yelps of laughter, tears, and an unsolicited cuddle from Izzy for the photographer.
It’s been an odd morning (a large part of our small house has been transformed into a photo studio, and there are lots of strange, new people to show off in front of). As fatigue sets in, the inevitable tantrums occur.
With toddler meltdowns, the frustration builds, then, within seconds, it has blossomed into an unfettered rage at a cruel and unjust universe. The cause? A row between the girls about a stuffed, felt leek that languished at the bottom of the toy box, only now to become their ‘most-prized possession ever’.
Dr Harvey Karp, paediatrician to the stars and America’s most influential child-raising guru, looks up amid the tumult.
“So, the big message to take from this,” he says, as Evelyn screams, banshee-like, in his ear, “is that it’s impossible for an individual to take care of two toddlers by themselves. It’s something we were never meant to do.”
Karp says raising children in nuclear families, without the help of relatives, is the biggest experiment in human history. Modern childhood is synthetic, he says.
Karp has made his name devising techniques to negotiate childhood, and it’s one of these — a skill he calls talking ‘toddler-ese’ — that he’s about to demonstrate. He turns to Isabel, scrunches up his face, and waves his hands around.
“Izzy says: ‘Mine, mine, mine...’ You want it; you want it now,” he says in a high-pitched voice, sounding just a mite less grumpy than Izzy does.
To people who believe parents must lead by example, this seems inappropriate and contrary to the tantrum policy adopted by my wife, Helen, and I: that we ignore them — we do not negotiate with terrorists. But Isabel, bless her, stops screaming.
This magic is all in a day’s work for the avuncular Karp. Over the past decade, he’s become Hollywood’s go-to authority on child-rearing. The Atlantic magazine dubbed him “America’s pre-eminent baby shaman,” and although he dislikes the focus on his celebrity clients, it hasn’t stopped him from publicising how Pierce Brosnan, Madonna and Michelle Pfeiffer trusted him to care for their children. He touts his relationships with the stars, he says, to further his “mission” to make children better-adjusted. In marketing terms, it’s going stunningly well.
Karp’s first book — The Happiest Baby on the Block — was published a decade ago but remains a bestseller, and has been translated into 20 languages.
His new book, The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep, shot to No2 on Amazon in the summer. Karp-branded DVDs and CDs abound in American homes. Worldwide, thousands of Karp-certified ‘happiest baby educators’ teach his ‘five Ss’ technique.
The method, which was deemed effective by a study in the journal, Pediatrics, involves calming infants through swaddling, swinging, sucking, “shushing” sounds, and side or stomach placement.
His premise will make sense to many parents, but risks offence: that toddlers are Neanderthals. Who else poos in the lounge and paints on the walls? “Think of your fussy friend as a pint-sized caveman... Living with a toddler is like taking a trip into our prehistoric past,” says Karp.
“They’re unsophisticated little people and it’s our job, as parents, to civilise them.”
As he says this, Isabel is sticking a piece of cucumber up her nose. That’s my girl, I think.
Karp says the caveman qualities of the under-fives are linked to the development of their brains. The left half of the brain likes detail: picking just the right word; solving problems step by step.
The right is in charge of “dancing and fighting”; it responds to emotive gestures, to handwaving and facial expressions. It is irrational and excitable. And guess what — it rules toddler behaviour.
When adults get upset, the influence of the left side of our brains diminishes and we become less logical and less eloquent.
“Toddlers are like that on a good day,” says Karp. “When they get upset, they really get prehistoric.”
This is where the ‘toddlerese’ comes in. When toddlers experience strong emotions, they lose the ability to ‘hear’ as the brain’s language centre grinds to a halt.
The instinct of parents is to adopt what Karp calls a “give me the gun” voice — the kind of calm tone that one might use to try to talk a desperate man from a ledge, but which will not connect with a toddler in thrall to his hyperactive right brain.
This leads, Karp says, to a communication impasse. The parents’ job, according to another of his analogies (he is big on analogies), is to become a kind of “diplomat” to break the deadlock.
You must learn to speak the language of the foreign land with which you are communicating: ‘toddlerese’. Become fluent and you will penetrate the “jungle of emotions” in which your toddler is lost, and lead them back to “civilisation”.
This means you speak in short sentences, use repetition, and mimic the mannerisms of your little cave-person.
‘Toddler-ese’ is a supercharged, but controlled, baby talk. You must flap your arms to mirror your child’s frustration, and raise the pitch of your voice to reflect your understanding of their agitated state.
In short, if your daughters are throwing a wobbly in public, you’re going to get some odd looks.
Karp re-enacts a model scenario in one of his DVDs, describing a two-year-old who wants a biscuit five minutes before dinner.
“There’s no point trying to reason with a two-year-old,” he says. “What you do is say: ‘Cookie. You want cookie. Cookie. You want cookie. You want cookie.’ You say it multiple times till he looks at you, and then you say: ‘No. No cookies. No cookies. Dinner first. We eat dinner first’.”
The success-rate claims for such techniques are striking. In a majority of cases, his methods will calm a child in seconds, he says. This is partly because the toddler is receiving what he or she craves the most — not the toy, or whatever else they happen to be demanding, but their parents’ attention and understanding.
There is a catch. You must tailor your ‘toddler-ese’ to the temperament of the child. Children with strong personalities need more of their emotions mirrored back to them; shy children need less. Beware of hamming it up too much.
“The goal of ‘toddler-ese’ is to calm children through understanding and respect,” Karp says.
Bounce too much of their emotion back and your toddler will think you’re mocking him. (Instructions on how to speak ‘toddler-ese’ are included in his book, The Happiest Toddler on the Block. There’s a DVD with the same title, with an endorsement from comedian, Larry David, on the cover: “Dr Karp’s not a paediatrician, he’s a magician.”)
These tricks have made Karp wealthy. In a children’s ward in an inner-city hospital in the Bronx, in New York, he decided to specialise in paediatrics.
He was making his rounds one day and Soul Train, the 1970s music show, was playing on television.
“You had these kids, and some of them were really sick, but they were dancing away to the music,” he says.
Later, Karp and his wife learned they could not have children. He has a stepdaughter, who is 29 and who came into his life when she was eight. He used his communication techniques with her, although she was far past toddler age when they met.
Karp says the fundamentals underpinning ‘toddler-ese’ apply equally well to adults. But, he says, perhaps a little defensively, his theories are the result of thousands of interactions with ‘small patients’.
Karp has sold more than three million books and DVDs. (He says the DVDs are more useful, because ‘toddler-ese’ is acted out.) But when he says he’s motivated by the “mission”, not the cash, it’s easy to believe him.
He arrives looking shiny and Californian (his car numberplate reads “KARPE DIEM”). His teeth are very white; his tank top lends him an academic air (he is an assistant professor of paediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine). He’s shod in a slick COVER STORY pair of loafers. But he’s more interested in building a rapport with the kids than in blowing his own trumpet.
Our homes, Karp says, are both too boring (blank walls, enclosed spaces) and too stimulating (television) for toddlers. If you’re looking after a small child, chances are you’re overstretched. His advice? Get help if you can; failing that, cut yourself some slack.
This isn’t to say he won’t point out mistakes. Just about the first thing that happens when he arrives at our home is Isabel falls off the arm of a sofa. She lands, headfirst, with a sickening smack on a wood floor. I scramble to pick her up. She’s crying hard. I use what’s become my standard tactic in such situations — reassuring her that she’s going to be fine.
Karp doesn’t approve. It is a big bang on the head — “a trauma” — and not to acknowledge it as such risks teaching Isabel to bottle up her feelings in the future.
Later, he cites studies that suggest that repressed feelings can contribute to a range of ailments, from heart disease to damaged immune systems.
There’s also the issue of character: “This is about how you raise a child to be more patient, co-operative and respectful,” he says.
“By the time they’re three or four, you’ve created the person.” But he says that one technique is not going to work for everyone, and our experiences bear this out.
Isabel responds pretty well to ‘toddlerese’, while Evelyn remains impervious. (I have a kind of perverse pride in her ability to resist.) The technique has transformed bed-times with Isabel, who was becoming a diva, wanting to have her back stroked until she dropped off.
Now, she gets a few strokes, and then we tell her we’re just going to the kitchen for a few minutes. Her newly learned patience means she doesn’t protest when we leave. And when we return, she’s almost always asleep.
This I read as a sign that our little cave-girls are slowly approaching civilisation. The thing is, for all the tears and tantrums, I’m certain I’m going to miss the Neanderthals when they’re gone.
¦ See Happiest Baby website
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