Joining the clan of the cave-kids
It's a beautiful spring morning, and Dr. Harvey Karp, dressed in a vest and a blue polka-dot tie, steps into a park in Santa Monica like a stealthy urban anthropologist.
"Come into my time machine," he says, as he crosses from a world of cars and coffee into a world of seesaws, slides and sandboxes. "Dial back 20,000 years."
Here in Douglas Park, Karp is taking a curious adult on a tour of an ancient jungle world, speaking a primitive tongue with its playground natives. He points to a 13-month-old boy standing uncertainly in the sand by a slide. "There's one, in the red pants," he says. "His cerebellum is not fully developed. He has a wide stance; his hands are up. He is more chimpanzee. Chimps walk for 15 feet, then get back down on all fours." Which the boy does.
Then Karp zooms in on a 3-year-old girl by the picnic table in a pink sun hat, who fills her small backpack with toys. "She's a villager," he says. "She is very methodical. She understands sequencing." She is also willing to share and barter, he says. She is cooperative and aware of social hierarchies. And over there, look, in the sandbox, Karp spots a "Neanderthal," who's able to whack with precision and use primitive tools (such as a plastic shovel).
Karp became something of a cult figure with new parents two years ago when he wrote "The Happiest Baby on the Block." Now the Santa Monica pediatrician and professor of pediatrics at UCLA School of Medicine is back with a new book, "The Happiest Toddler on the Block," released this month by Bantam Books. Rather than a cerebral or psychological approach to child rearing, both books emphasize a physical, behavioral approach. The first, which sold 200,000 copies, detailed five techniques for calming colicky babies and introduced phrases like "the fourth trimester" into the parenting lexicon.
The new book counsels parents on how to get through the terrible twos and also deals much more broadly with toddlers and how to communicate with them. Karp posits that toddlers are cavemen. For the first four years, he suggests, it would be better to think of your child as a "chimpanzee" (12 to 18 months), a "Neanderthal" (18 to 24 months), a "cave-kid" (24 to 36 months) or a "villager" (36 to 48 months). So if you really want to communicate with toddlers, forget talking to your child as if he or she is a small adult. Instead, squat down to the child's level like a monkey and start grunting and shouting. (Yes! That loudly!)
