Happiest_Baby

That's fantastic!

You have two jobs with the calming reflex. One is to turn it on, and the other is to keep it turned on. When you put her in bed, you want to continue some of the 5 S's, like snug swaddling and the right type of white noise.

Over the first six months of life, one of your big jobs as a parent is to teach your baby to feel secure and trusting. So you really want to respond to her fussing whenever you can. That's what teaches her to have confidence in the people who love her. After nine months there will be plenty of opportunities to teach her what discipline means and limit setting. Now the goal is to build her trust and confidence.

I was interested in all areas of medicine but working in the South Bronx with underprivileged kids, I was so amazed by their resilience and I felt so good as a doctor to be able to make a difference and be able to relieve their suffering that it captured my heart. And maybe I always to be able to tell my parents what they should do - I like giving other parents advice.

I almost went into pediatric cardiology. I trained in that for a year, but I missed dealing with the whole child and the whole family. For the last twenty years, what I've been most interested in is trying to solve problems that hadn't been solved before. That's what drew me to the issue of crying babies and sleep. I was especially motivated to do this when I worked at the UCLA emergency room in the 1980s and had to care for children who were seriously injured or even killed by their parents for no other reason but they were crying. It just made no sense to me that we could put a man on the moon but we couldn't teach parents how to calm their babies better.

I feel so terrible that parents have the worry that their child could be autistic. This is an area where I feel that our medical leaders have to do a much better job. During the decades that I've been a pediatrician, I've seen the number of children rise dramatically with the diagnosis of autism. There is a ton of evidence that this is not related to vaccines, but I am very concerned that it could be related to chemical exposure during pregnancy. We are exposed to so many endocrine disrupting chemicals in our personal care products, in cleaning products that can have all sort of effects on the developing child. It's why I feel deeply committed to reducing environmental exposures in children. For the past five years, I've been on the board of directors for Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org) and I highly recommend you take a look there for suggestions on how to keep your house as safe and healthy as possible.

I don't think I'd worry about this yet (she's clearly indicated what she wants by her gaze.) One thing I would do is to spend a little time trying to teach her sign language. A 1-year-old can usually learn several signs like milk, blanket, flower, dog, etc. When she interacts with you and shows interest in the things you are sharing with her, that's a nice sign of her being at the appropriate level of social development.

Great question. Of course, none of us can predict the future, but I feel as a pediatrician I've been particularly focused on not just preventing unsafe issues, but adding safety. Exhaustion is the number one stress on new parents. It can trigger post-partum depression, child abuse, unsafe sleeping practices and infant sleep deaths, breastfeeding failure, car accidents, over-treatment with medication, marital stress, and even obesity of the mother and child. I am very hopeful that by reducing a child's crying, improving their sleep, and being able to keep babies in the safest position - on the back, all night - for the first six months, will significantly improve the health babies and their parents.

One last thing - we have had our product reviewed by several independent safety experts to make sure we are doing everything possible to create the best bed for our babies.

After teaching the 5 S's to families for ten years, I was so happy that it helped calm crying babies but many parents still complained they were having trouble getting their babies to sleep at night. Poor nighttime sleep is not just a nuisance, it is a very serious burden on families and can trigger post artum depression, child abuse, even infant sleep death (not to mention it makes it harder to lose the baby weight). I realized that if we could make a bed that delivered the 5 S's through out the night, it could help a lot of children get sleep at night. Today if you have a nanny or a night nurse, you are pretty well-off. And if you have two, you're definitely rich. But, throughout human history, up until a hundred years ago, all parents had four or five nannies. They were called your grandmother, aunt, and older sister. Parents today are really struggling with more dangerous neighborhoods, fewer parks, less experience knowing how to take care of children, less family support, more economic pressure. When you lay sleep deprivation on top of that, it can be really crushing.

Five years ago, I went out and found a partner, one of the leading engineers of MIT robotics and we joined forces together to create a totally new type of baby bed in SNOO smart sleeper, which I like to think of as an extra set of hand to help when Grandma leaves…or a virtual night nurse to help parents 24/7 for 6 months.