I let my kids give them up on their own. The pacifier wasn’t causing any problems for them.
Perhaps I might have been worried about the looks I’d get from other parents if the kid still had one when he was 3 or 4, but it never came up because my oldest gave his up before age 2.
They will give it up on their own, why make it a battle? You will have plenty of those coming right up.
For another data point, Eve, the nurses gave one to my son in the NICU because he was being fed by a tube but they wanted to encourage his sucking reflex so he’d start eating normally. They taped the sucker to a towel and had it right next to his little face. I guess that’s important for some babies.
He left the hospital an addict, or so we thought. When we decided he was too old for it, my husband just picked them all up. It turns out they were much more of an impulse for Cranky Jr, and out of sight was out of mind. He found one in a toybox several months later and he put it in his mouth, but decided it was boring and spit it out again.
I wish you the best of luck. My niece finally “lost” her last pacifier last year, a few weeks after her FIFTH birthday. (We figure she would’ve given it up before she started kindergarten.)
My nephew (19 months) was never given one due to his sister’s “addiction.” I have a feeling baby #3 (due any day now) won’t get one either.
Why bother? It doesn’t really hurt anything. If you force the issue, some other habit (nail biting, for example) will just replace it. Trust me, she will decide to do without it before she graduates from high school. An orthodontist told me the thumb/pacifier actually doesn’t usually cause crooked teeth. That is more likely a genetic tendency or a speech habit than anything else.
Lots of kids are never given pacifiers to begin with, and so they just take to sucking thumbs or fingers instead. When they are old enough to have better things to do, they stop. Slight sidetrack: My mom told a story about someone trying to tell my older sister to take her thumb out of her mouth (Sis must have been at most 2 yrs old at the time). Mom looked the guy right in the eye and told him “It’s her thumb, she can do what she wants with it. It’s better than that cigar!” Seems the busybody WAS chomping away on a big ol’ fat ceegar.
Really? because I was told just before I got my braces that my sucking my thunmb was how my overbite resulted. I was told this by the orthodontist, just before I was finally forced to give it up. (I was 11 when I finally kicked the thumb sucking and that was because I was forced to) I never actually sucked my thumb in public, just in private places when I felt all stressed out.
But then I suspect I have some kind of oral fixation, I love lollipops and hard candies… and of course now I’m a smoker. Part of it could be because I found/find the action soothing. I was always very stressed out and high strung (still am)
How do I make college kids going to raves give up their pacifiers?
Take away their Ecstasy.
What you must understand is that the sucking reflex is the only instinct man possesses. This is becuase it is necessary to live. See CrankyAsAnOldMan’s post. It is more than a ‘habit’. I agree that unless it is to the point that development is being altered or delayed (as in the case with tooth and palate formation or social skills) there is no reason to try to stop the behavior. Just be glad it is a pacifier and not a thumb - my son sucked his thumb in his sleep until he was about 8, which is why he was in braces for 4 years.
I’ll warn you, kids will have pacifiers hidden in places you don’t know about. When my parents finally took my sister’s away, she was pulling spares out for almost a month.
Apparently, I got off mine really easy (at about age 2.) Dad said to me, “Don’t you think you’re getting too old for that?” I set it down on a table and never picked it up again that day. It was gone the next one.
My sister’s response to that tactic:
<pop>
“No I’m not!”
<pop>
My parents made my throw my own pacifiers away when I was almost 4. I cried and cried and cried. And kept begging for one. But my parents held fast and I never got another one. I was so mad at them though.
Lo and behold, my teeth were still really messed up. It couldn’t have been genetics because neither my parents nor my sister had any of the same problems I did. I have had retainers in my mouth since I was 5 to this day.
I do have a serious oral fixation, although I have almost completely given up smoking (3/year is my current average, and has been for 3 years) and I always crunch up hard candy. I do, however, chew on the skin next to my nails on my fingers until they bleed. ew.
Paidhi girl never did care for pacifiers, and so never had to give them up. She wasn’t a thumb-sucker either, though she was a very frequent nurser.
Paidhi boy, on the other hand, is still binking away. Bizarrely, he had trouble from the day he was born latching on to nurse, but we found out a few days after he was born that he would latch on right away if he had a pacifier for a minute or two before nursing. (Bizzare, because often lactation consultants warn you not to let a nursing baby have a bink, because it might mess up their ability to latch on properly.) He became addicted fairly quickly.
He’s three, and I don’t see any reason to force him to get rid of it–I figure he’ll give it up when he’s ready. I’m not worried about teeth–people in my family generally have more teeth than we have room for, I don’t really see how not sucking on a bink is going to prevent that.
When my nephew was two, my SIL tried to get him to give up his pacifier.
She hid it one evening. When he fussed about not having it, she told him a story about the little boy who lost his pacifier:
“You’re a big boy now, you don’t need a pacifier.
Daddy doesn’t have a pacifier. Jim (a friend) doesn’t have a pacifier. You don’t need one anymore.”
My nephew responded with:
“I’m still a little boy, I do too need my pacifier.”
He then told the story about the mother who lost her cigarette :eek:
“Daddy doesn’t have a cigarette. Jim doesn’t have a cigarette.”
Guess who got his pacifier? 
For a review of the current info on why pacifiers are used, and the implications for dental health, see: Pacifier Non-nutritive Sucking in Infancy and Early Childhood - Protocol, the intro to an evidence-based medicine review of the existing data. The conclusions have not yet been reached, though. There is data saying pacifier definitely do affect tooth development/alignment, and others saying it is more genetics and other oral habits that cause the problem.
There’s also a confounding factor that needs to be addressed re: pacifiers. It is known that the longer the child breastfeeds, the lower the risk of malocclusion (crooked teeth). And it is known that in at least some cases, pacifier use interferes with breastfeeding success and duration (only if other issues exist - it has no impact if no breastfeeding difficulties occur). So, if pacifiers reduce breastfeeding, and breastfeeding prevents malocclusion, then it is quite possible that research has correlated the wrong item (pacifier use, instead of shorter duration of breastfeeding). Or not, but until someone looks at the data more carefully, there is no way to tell.
In the meantime, limiting pacifier use is probably your least-traumatic approach. Just like other forms of weaning, abrupt may work fine for your child. Or it might be a heart-rending disaster. It is far more likely that slower weaning will not cause more of an issue.
Also, it is important to note that at this age, what you are asking her to give up is not just a pacifier, it is probably a transitional object. There are implications for taking away comfort items from toddlers and even older children. These are important objects that help promote independance, as the child takes a bit of ‘mommy comfort’ along with them, in the form of the object. Here’s the AAP take on transitional objects. You might want to consider trying to wean her ONTO a different object before you take away the current one. Because these objects are very valuable to their psychological development, just up and taking it away can have unexpected and unintended consequences. It also explains why it is SO HARD to get rid of the habit at this point - you aren’t just getting rid of a pacifier (object), you are also trying to remove something that serves as a stand-in for mommy. You might as well try getting her to agree to never see her mommy again. Sound like the level of fight you get?
Weaning from transitional objects usually happens closer to 3-5 years old (or up to 7 or so), and many people keep their transitional objects into adulthood, even if they don’t use them. The method described by Dangerosa is the one I’ve seen supported the most often.
Good luck introducing a substitute transitional object. Some kids will take to the idea, others will not. But be prepared for seeing that object around for a while to come, whatever it is. (We bought four identical blankies for our older son, so we’d always have a spare - just remember to rotate them, so they have equal wear patterns…)
Hot damn. I didn’t post about this because I knew it was counterintuitive, but we had the exact same experience. Cranky Jr would be so agitated, he wouldn’t latch on right, but if I gave him a pacifier for a few seconds and then ripped it out of his mouth and shoved the nipple into his range, bam, he was latched and happy. My lactation consultant was befuddled, although she said if it works, it works. My theory is that it got him calmed down enough to take the time to get a good latch.
My kid is still huge on transitional objects. It’s never one specific thing. But he’s almost four, and nearly every day he has to take something to daycare, and leave with something else. It’s the same way when he goes to play with his little friends at their houses.
My first son was very much into his pacifier, probably when he was about the same age as yours. If we couldn’t find his pacifier we’d dig everywhere to find one: move furniture, go out to the car, through cupboards, whatever it took.
One night, he and I looked everywhere for one. We looked and looked and couldn’t find one. I said, “well, it’s lost”. He seemed okay with it, and he went to sleep. A few days later he saw someone else’s, and I just told him, “that’s Joey’s pacifier, not yours.” He never had a problem with it after that.
Is she your first kid? If so, another piece of advice from a father of three: don’t sweat this stuff. If she grows out of it when she’s three, then so be it. If you take it away and she freaks, don’t buy into it.
She’s smarter than you think; she knows she’s manipulating you. People told me this with my first kid and I didn’t believe them. By the third kid I finally had it figured out (she’s 3.5 now).
I don’t have kids but it seems to me the easiest way would be to just chuck the thing into the damn garbage.
My son was a binky addict and kept his till he was almost 2 1/2. By that time, I had a two-month-old who was using one and I said that I was for DAMN sure not hunting pacifiers for two kids (mine had to have the bigger size from the start and so the two binkies were the same size–perfect for my son to get them mixed up), that it was long past time for him to stop, and I took it away. The only reason that I’d let him keep it so long in the first place was because I was having another baby. One, I always get ENORMOUS during pregnancy (“Are you having twins?” “NO!”) and I was just too tired to fight the good fight. Two, I didn’t want him to feel any extra insecurites over the new baby and all the fuss. But after she got here and I found myself searching for one and then the other, and also trying to keep the new baby’s binky out of the two year old’s mouth, I had just had enough. Other than constantly reminding him not to try to use hers, it was surprisingly easy to make him give it up. My baby girl is now a year old and takes a cup instead of a bottle and I just quietly got rid of the pacifier at the same time. It is really a relief to give up the late night binky hunts!!
Oh, and both kids started sleeping better when I got rid of the pacifier. They were apparently waking up in the night and when they couldn’t find it, they would fuss until someone found it and gave it to them. After they stopped using one, they quit doing that–they still fuss occasionally in the night, but not EVERY SINGLE NIGHT the way they had been.
she isn’t my first, shes actually number 2 of 3… the first and third ones don’t take pacifiers and never have (ages 4, 2, 7 months)
its rough, espicially since i am a pushover so when she comes to me with those sobbing little “please daddy” cries i usually give in…
and for mssmith… becuase you are taking away a major source of security which is truly a traumatic experience for a toddler (like loosing mom or dad, just maybe not that extreme), so you should always handle it with care… you can’t use one method for all children because every child is different, and you always want it to go as smooth as possible (plus when you have 3 kids in the house, the last thing you need is for one to be screaming and crying making the other 2 do the same)
I never had a pacifier but I sucked my thumb until I was at least 10. My parents kept asking “aren’t you too old for that?” etc but I didn’t care. Yucky stuff, nail polish, gloves, etc were all applied to no avail. Looking back I can’t help but wonder if my stubbornness had something to do with hitting puberty very early (first period at 9, seriously needed a bra by 10)… I was a “Big Girl” in plenty of ways, thankyouverymuch.
When I had to get braces the orthodondist applied a spiky device to the roof of my mouth… sharp enough to punch holes in my tongue the first week before it was adjusted properly.
This really does work.
I have a friend who did it with her son. He was 2 1/2 and had about three pacifiers he liked to use.
Every morning before Kiddo woke up she would cut the tips down on the pacifiers. I think that she did two very quickly and the third she let last about two weeks. He carried them around for awhile and let people know that they were “broken” but got tired of trying to suck on the really quickly.