Parent Advice - Pacifiers

[Guest]

.

[saabnet]

I've gotten a ton of great advice from many experienced parents here on KF so I'm asking yet another question. Elle and I are leaning in slightly different directions on whether to let Lily have a pacifier (paci, nuk)... A couple of times now when she's been crying, I've let her have my pinky and that settles her down right away... but after awhile of watching the cutie suck away... my arm gets pretty tired or I have to go to the bathroom or something else comes up...

Anyway... anyone have an opinion (except for Geoff/bikeme  ) on pacifiers and their use?

Thanks,

-Scott

[Buchanan Family]

I still remember absolutely loving mine as a little kid (one of my earliest memories?) but that's not actually advice 

More specifically, I remember it being lost before bedtime and being upset/crying.  I think there was a special string with a snap to attach it to my night shirt.

I used to call it a binky.

[Martha]

I found pacifiers worth their weight in gold!  My kids all just sort of lost interest in their binkies when they were way too young to remember having had them.  None of my kids were thumb suckers, either.

[Margaret]

One of my kids used a pacifier, the other two were thumb suckers (one for a long time).  They are all teenagers now and neither habit really bothered me much.

Margaret

[Sherri]

I used a pascifier as a child and as a result have some teeth problems that I never got fixed. Look visually good to me, but my dentist says my teeth are misaligned or an over bite or some such. My mom never thought it was worth the 20K to fix if my smile looks nice. But... I do wish my parents had never given me and my siblings 'soothers' as we called them. My niece is being raised without them and it's going well.

[abc]

Can't speak for myself  (I forgot to have kids), but I just asked the
Sainted Spouse, who has three grown ones, and he said the only
problem was finding lost binkies. No problems at all with the kids.

I've heard it said, maybe by Occupational Therapists or other childhood
developmental experts, that children will seek out "self-soothing"
behaviors, and that the oral drive to suck on a binkie or a thumb
is one of those things that children can and will do to calm
themselves down. Which can't be a bad thing, right? The ability
to be in charge of your own soothing, like when it's time for
bedtime or whenever, seems like a plus in the binky column.

Now that I think of it, SS's kids all have good teeth too. Me, I sucked
my thumb and did wear braces.

So if a kid's going to do it anyway, give them a nice binkie. Why the hell not.

[redstarr]

With my sister, my folks chose not to use a pacifier, and she learned to suck her fingers instead,and sucked them (at least while sleeping) till she was WAY too big a girl to still have the habit (like dentists were worried about her harming her permanent teeth). 

With my brother, my folks used pacifiers, so it was much easier to stop the sucking habit. 

You can take away the pacifiers completely when they get too old to for them to be appropriate.  You can't take away thumbs and fingers.  If you throw out all the pacifiers, there's no way for the little one to sneak them.  There's no feasible way to keep them from sneaking a thumb into their mouth.

But I don't have kids, so feel free to take my input as lightly as possible.