Ah!  I think I know what bothers me about Harvey Karp's method.  It's a Method!  

I'm just finishing an excellent book called "Baby Catcher" by Peggy Vincent.  Before she had children (and well before she was a midwife doing homebirths), she was a Lamaze instructor as well as an obstetric nurse.  After 2 years of teaching the strict Lamaze party line, she had her first baby... and found the method totally ineffective for her.  So she started including a full hour of staged labor in her childbirth classes, taking the women's labor partners as her own, one after another.  She roared, she panted, she screamed, she swore, she twisted her fingers through their belt loops, pressed her forehead into their chests, forced them to hold her up and sway with her, stared into their eyes, pushed them away, held them close, made them massage her leg... basically, went through a continuous hour-long repertoire of things that a laboring woman might do.  They were always fascinated by it, and found their own labors to be familiar territory even when things didn't go according to their plan.  One mother's subsequent comment:  "My labor was very normal... and I did it much better than you did!"

*Whenever* we present a specific method, or program, or set of rules, or single philosophy, I think to some extent we're dismissing both the baby's individuality and the mother's instinctive responses.  How much more realistic to present a whole smorgasbord of options from which a mother can choose, so that she doesn't come to think that one clever person has All The Answers, and if she could just do it the way that person does, everything would be fine.   I'd hate to give a mother the impression that there's a one-size-fits-all to *anything* about motherhood!

We've all agreed that Harvey Karp didn't invent "the 5 S's".  So let's not be so quick to associate his name with them!  We can suggest the techniques as part of our smorgasbord, recommend the book if we choose, but do so as a book that goes into more detail on a few age-old techniques, rather than implying that this one book somehow has the newly-discovered corner on baby-soothing.

For the record, Lamaze worked extremely well for me... but in hindsight I feel I really lost something in sticking to a Method and not daring to feel my own way through my own labors.  I now envy the women who rocked and swayed and hummed and sang.  I was a by-the-book person.  I did as I was told and did it well.  But I wish I had been reassured that I already knew how to birth a baby, that Lamaze didn't know everything about every labor, and that it was "okay" to follow my instincts...

Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC  Ithaca, NY  USA
www.wiessinger.baka.com

             ***********************************************

To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail
To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest)
To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet
All commands go to [log in to unmask]

The LACTNET email list is powered by LISTSERV (R).
There is only one LISTSERV. To learn more, visit:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html