Explain to me the ethos behind "NO PACIFIERS" parenting.

We raised one with a pacifier, but the other two wanted nothing to do with them.

yeah, we have attempted giving Sylvie a pacifier, but she spits it out almost immediately. She loves finger sucking though.

Far as I know there have been different conflicting reasons why pacifiers are evil over the last 40 years but they're all pretty much bullshit.

Not that I'm saying you should force the kid to have one if they don't want it.

my kids rejected the pacifier, my first after about a week, the second one never tolerated it. they were breastfed so i can see why they would be gtfo

yeah all our kids have been breastfed, but #2 and #3 only wanted the real thing, not this plastic bullshit. They certainly sucked on all other kinds of crap, rocks, coins...it's amazing that kids ever survive.

#1 on the other hand used a pacifier until she was four, and then taking them away was tragic, e.g. "Daddy where are you hiding my pacifiers?"

I really feel guilty when I saw Ophelia go for her thumb and start sucking it. I know our nights would be peaceful, but in the long run? Elisabeth LOVES her pacifier. Both were breastfed.

I have never heard of this no pacifiers thing.

Advice from the British Dental Health Foundation: If you can, avoid using a dummy and discourage thumb sucking.

^^^ as someone with a (british, no less) cousin who never kicked sucking her thumb until laaaaaate (like we're talking adolescence), i can attest that it will actually fuck up your teeth in a way that is visible from ten paces

er thanks dental health foundation.. for letting us try to square that advice with this:

http://fsid.org.uk/Page.aspx?pid=585

"Settling your baby to sleep with a dummy – even for naps – can reduce the risk of cot death."

louis had a dummy for awhile but now he's a full-on thumbsucker

I sucked on two fingers until I was um let's say maaaaaybe up to age 10, and I have no damage. But I know that's not universal.

i am not a parent or a pediatrician, but i'd say if dummies are a way to stave off thumb-sucking, go for it.

TH i assume you do not mean our own, dear LJ

...but yr guy is still a babe, right? i think ten is str8 up weird (sorry laurel, still <3 u), but as long as it doesn't track you into late adolescence yr probably cool

also, as an aside: laurel i'd wager that two-finger sucking (index and middle, yeah?) is mechanically different than thumb sucking, w/r/t dentition. your thumb actually hooks around behind yr front teeth and pulls on them. and that's what my cousin's mouth looks like: her front teeth up top are actually protrude out a bit along a curvilinear path (incisors out the most, eye teeth less so, canines barely)

Yes, index and middle. You might be right about all that stuff. I can't remember exactly when I stopped; it went along with a death-grip on a certain fuzzy baby blanket, which I never really stopped sleeping with so I can't separate the behaviors in my memory.

Isn't one of the arguments that dummies, as we call them over here, inhibit language development?

Ooh I am a dummy nazi... Howie had one for a few months but I got sick of picking the wretched thing off the floor 20 times a night.

Archie therefore has never been given one. He was sucking his thumb in both my antenatal scans and has carried on since birth -- although not so much now he's got a couple of teeth.

I probably sucked my thumb until I was about 11? It fucked up my complete mouth tbh. I had braces, but the (specialized) dentist took a risk with not pulling my wisdom teeth.... which was so RONG in the long run. My upper teeth look sort of fine, but below is just NO. Ah well. C'est la vie. Ophelia doesn't suck her thumb so much anymore during the day. I told her it was a no no during the day, she can do it in her bed.

In re to language development, I think a pacifier might hinder Elisabeth's. We've been trying to lessen the usage of a pacifier.

I thought the whole argument behind this was that it interfered with breast feeding.

It can, but only if introduced in the first 4-6 weeks, and plenty of people say it didn't make any difference. We managed 4 weeks before I decided I couldn't stand being a human dummy any more and Aidan was fine breastfeeding afterwards

Howie had one from about three weeks (when the colic kicked in) and it didn't interfere with breastfeeding at all. (It did interfere with sleeping for more than 30 minutes at a stretch, but that's another story!)

Neither Amber nor Alice had pacifiers/dummys.

Amber sucked her thumb until her baby teeth were 'over', we told her about 'you might well need braces to straighten yr teeth', not 'scarily' just matter-of-factly, and she pretty much stopped immediately.

Alice never sucked her thumb, ever.

I remember when I was first pregnant thinking pacifiers were going to be my savior ie kid cryies, kid gets pacifier, kids not crying anymore. Of course, it doesn't work that way at all. In any case, Beeps would never take a pacifier. She sucks her thumb loosely only when falling asleep now but she did go through a period of rubbing her teeth up and down while sucking so she was permanently missing most of the skin on that thumb.

Something I recently read was that thumb sucking is preferable to a pacifier because the child is able to comfort themselves which = more sleep for parents.

Henry uses a pacifier but doesn't seem in love with it. He has also learned to scream with it in his mouth so there goes my original theory. It does seem to chill himk out sometimes though. I hate him sleeping with it just because it ends up lodged in his neck or ear and wakes him up. Our biggest fear though is when the time comes to separate the child from the binky.

My niece was one of those kids who had pacifiers hidden all over the house, car, backyard etc etc. Her parents ended up telling her a story when she was 3ish. It was about all the poor pacifier-less babies in the world who needed her 'dubbers' more than a big girl like her did. They collected all of the pacifiers in a box and took them to the Santa Claus in the NYC Macys who had been briefed of the situation ahead of time. He promised on Christmas eve he would take the pacifiers with him on his present run leaving them for kids who needed them. She wasn't happy about it but it worked.

I kind of like the paci-fairy technique because the kid gets really involved. Here are some peeps who did it but The idea is to give all the pacifiers up, not just one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFJCDOrBnUw

i don't really know anything about this stuff, but: my three-year-old niece still has a pacifier (and apparently a baby bottle) while my six-year-old niece, who is in kindergarten, wears a pullup diaper to bed.

i don't know what the "dangers" supposedly are, but aren't they a bit old for that?

Lots and lots of kids are in nappies at nighttime until 6/7+ years. Nighttime continence is something that (unlike daytime) cannot be 'trained', you simply have to wait until they are physically ready to go the whole night dry and clean.

okay, cool.

(how does that happen, anyway? i seem to remember kind of training myself that if i was dreaming about peeing i should really really try to wake up . . .)

my son wore a nighttime pullup until he was about 5

We did a slightly less-involved version of the paci-fairy. We were out for dinner one night, and saw a little baby with a pacifier. We told the boys that it was now time for them give all their pacis "to the babies." Then we gathered them all up that night, and told the boys we were going to give them to the babies. They seemed satisfied with that explanation, and pretty much got over their paci addiction after a night or two of restless sleep.

i plan on doing the same thing with my son's thumbs