It took you three kids to get to this point? I think I stopped wiping the second month!
I threw away the pacifier when I discovered that I was the one who had to pick it up after it had been dropped. Babies have lousy eye hand coordination.
MagicalSilverKey, when you become a parent, I suggest you pick your battles. If the kid is chewing on the recliner, and it isn’t doing him or the furniture any harm, and he’s happy, take advantage of it and do the dishes. They haven’t been done in two weeks because the baby has had colic and you’ve spent 14 hours a day walking him around the house, six hours a day nursing, two hours changing diapers or doing laundry, with the remaining two hours spent catching what little sleep you get.
I recommend you try providing this eminently reasonable and logical explanation to the next 10-month-old infant you run across, and see what happens.
:rolleyes:
It’s too bad that kids don’t come with a “no-strings-free-trial-and-return” policy, lol. I guess I just won’t be able to know what it’s like to deal with, until it happens to me.
FWIW: Years ago, a former live-in girlfriend of mine, had a baby. (no it wasn’t mine, she was already about 3 months preg. when we first met) I was there to watch it be born and helped take care of it, regularly, for about 6 months. I do have some baby experience. Because the child wasn’t my own, I never tried the “nothing in the mouth training.”
Ok, how many parents/caregivers here have a kid who tried to eat a ball that was bigger than his head? Raise your hands!
::Parent of three boys, raising both hands::
MSK, why don’t you try it? I’m willing to bet that your experience of a basketball will be vastly expanded once you give it a good mouthing. 
Of course, unless you actually taste and smell through your hands, that is.
As for what is/is not a toy (like tv remotes), you may have your own ideas, but such boundaries can be silly. They even make toys that look like remotes just so kids will play with them!
MSK, if you read some books on infant development, you’ll find that in babies, the nerve endings are often most developed in the mouth and face. Hands, for example, aren’t as developed yet, but cheeks are sensitive–that’s why you stroke a baby’s cheek with new textures. Mouthing things is a great way for a baby to explore–you get texture, taste, and smell input that you wouldn’t get with hands alone. Babies are sensory sponges, and they want to explore with everything they’ve got. If you don’t want your kid to try to eat item x, put item x out of reach and save everyone a lot of trouble. Buy cheap furniture for them to chew on (actually, many parents wind up treasuring old furniture with tiny teeth marks) and relax.
The other thing is, babies want to do what you do. They see you pushing buttons on the remote and talking on the phone, and they want to do it too. We gave our kid an extra batteryless remote and a busted phone, and they were much more played with than the plastic phone that made noise, but didn’t resemble a real phone.
Mouthing is an instinctive behavior with a very specific purpose. From The Baby Book, by William Sears, M.D. and Martha Sears, R.N.:
***Mouthing reflexes.*These reflexes help a baby find the source of food and ingest it. Of these, the sucking and swallowing reflexes are the most important for survival. Notice that your baby automatically sucks when you stimulate (in order of decreasing sensitivity) the soft palate, the interior of the mouth and lips, and the cheek and chin. A relative to the suck reflex is the rooting (or search) relfex. Using your nipple, tickle your baby’s face and watch him turn his head toward your nipple as if searching for food. The rooting reflex subsides around four months as reaching skills begin and the infant’s search for food becomes more voluntary.
You may not care for the look of an infant sucking on her fist, but I would strongly suggest that you not interfere with the mouthing behavior of any future child you may care for. Instinct only goes so far. As she grows, she will rely more and more on conscious behavior. If you teach her that mouthing/sucking is something she isn’t supposed to do, you may well interfere with her ability to feed.
As far as exploring with hands only, you may well have an exaggerated sense of what an infant can actually do with her hands. At birth, a baby will grasp instinctively any objects placed in her hands. However, grasping and holding on her own comes much later. Being able to reach out and accurately grasp a toy with one hand usually happens around 5 months, but at this stage the grasp is still mittenlike, wrapping all the fingers around the object and holding it against the palm. Sometime after 6 months, she will learn how to release grasped objects. (That’s when you get to play the “I drop it; you pick it up” game incessantly.) This allows her to learn to transfer objects from hand to hand. But she still needs much practice before she can effectively change the shape of her hand and the strength of her grasp to truly examine/explore a new object with her hands only.
Until then, she is going to want to use her mouth as well.
Some babies mostly give up mouthing on things once they have good hand control, but others don’t. Usually, they suck on things (like pacifiers) because the act of sucking is calming. (You really don’t want to interfere with your baby’s ability to self-calm. Trust me.) If you think about it, it makes sense that many of the infants/toddlers you see out in public (in stores, or on the street, where the sights/sounds/smells are constantly changing and often overstimulating) are sucking/mouthing on something.
Once their teeth start coming in, (this varies widely) chewing on toys is a very effective pain reliever. From the aesthetic, nonparent point of view, teething-related mouthing is even worse, as there is generally quite a bit of drooling as well. However, I’m sure you would be able to get over your initial distaste once you understood how much it makes a teething child feel better.
As a (potential/future) parent you certainly have some say in what your child is chewing on. If you are well prepared, you will have a good supply with you at all times. But don’t be surprised if you find yourself in the supermarket one day with a fussy baby and no toys. Suddenly, your key ring won’t look like such a bad idea after all. 
Yes, it does do him good. It calms him, he enjoys it, and he learns all on his own that it isn’t food.
People, not just babies, are naturally oral. Ever find yourself absent-mindedly chewing on the end of a pen? It happens.
Kids do strange things. Well, I should say, kids do things that ADULTS think are strange, but to the kid, it’s normal. Chewing on everything within reach is normal, to a child, and most parents and child-care professionals will tell you the same thing. That’s why things made specifcally for children under certain ages are either a) non-toxic, b) oversized so kids can’t swallow it, or c) both. And it’s usually both.
If there’s something you specifically don’t want your child to be touching and/or chewing on, the only way you can prevent it is to put it WAY the heck up, out of their reach, until said child is nearly old enough to graduate. Because once they move past the “putting everything in the mouth” stage, the “Hey, I can motate under my own power now, so I think I’ll grab that thing off the table!” stage follows. Then comes the “I can motate, therefore, I can CLIMB!” stage. That one’s fun. Can’t tell you how exciting it is to step out of the bathroom (where you’ve only been for fifteen seconds because you just had to pee) and find the child that HAD been quitely sitting on the couch watching “Blue’s Clues” suddenly standing on top of the bookshelf, five feet off the ground.
And yes, they ARE that fast. 
(You really don’t want to interfere with your baby’s ability to self-calm. Trust me.)
Boy, no kidding! I remember one night I had been up almost every half hour with my newborn. I was exhausted. I had just fallen back asleep when she started crying again. Just as I dragged myself out of bed, the cries stopped suddenly. Terrified, I ran to the bassinette (at the other end of the room) and saw she had discovered her thumb. She put herself back to sleep in just a few minutes. She sucked that thumb 'til she was about four years old (in public; I suspect she sucked it for a while after that at bedtime). While she still needed night feedings for a few months, she slept for longer intervals since she was able to self-soothe.
Let a baby suck on his or her fist, thumb, feet, whatever. My second child would only suck on a pacifier. There were many nights I had to get up several times to search in the dark for the “nookie” that had fallen on the floor through the crib. It got to the point where I’d make sure there were four or five of them in there before I went to bed.
And yeah - I would pick up a dropped pacifier and either lick it myself (if it fell in our house) or use a baby wipe (if it dropped in the store or in the dirt).
There’s just no way to dictate or set in stone what you will or will not let your kids do. You just have to play it by ear and go with the flow once you have them. But forbidding a baby or small child not to mouth things that aren’t dangerous is just wrong, not to mention mean. It’s just a baby’s instinct.
Sheri
:rolleyes: What a mess. Thanks for the input.
[sub]Now it may be time to research vasectomy costs and practices.[/sub]
Buy it or don’t, but the consensus of those who’ve done research in this area is that the mouth, lips, and face are far better at providing sensory input to the brain during infancy. Babies are still in the process of developing their neural pathways, a process that continues until they are much older – age 10 or so – at which point seldom-used used connections begin to be pruned away – which also takes a long time (perhaps as much as another 10 years, so that things don’t really stabilize until the early twenties). What this means is that the way people think – indeed, the kinds of thought they’re capable of – changes dramatically over time, and that expecting adult thinking from an infant is pointless. It’s all very well that you’re able to feel things nearly as well with your hands as with your mouth, but an infant can’t.
And that, if I may appropriate the immortal words of Bertie Wooster, is where you make your bloomer. Kids don’t develop any concept – or any mental machinery for dealing with such a concept – of abstract categories like “toys” and “not toys”, “food” and “not food”, until they’re older. With an older infant, you may succeed in imparting the idea that a particular object is not to be mouthed – though even in that case, their brains are growing and changing so fast that the same object may present entirely new aspects of itself for exploration a few days or even a few hours later. What you will not succeed at is trying to impart any sense of what categories of things may or may not be mouthed, because everything is sui generis to a baby.
Of course not, for the simple reason that you can no more “disallow” infants exploring things by mouth than Canute could order back the waves. Babies always have, and always will, put things in their mouths. There’s nothing whatever wrong with you deciding what things you’ll let them do it with and what things you won’t, but you have to be prepared to be the one to make that decision for quite a long time. There probably is the potential for harm in the frustration and stress, on both sides, that will result from your expectation that they should somehow “know” things that they’re not mentally equipped to know. Vigilance, distraction, substitution, and patience are the parent’s best friends in this. You have to carefully watch what ends up in their reach, and when it’s something you deem inappropriate for mouthing, engage the child’s attention in some other way, gently take away the offending object, offer something else you don’t mind them chewing – and then be prepared to keep doing the same thing over and over again without getting annoyed.