Learning to trust: Lessons from (not) pacifier weaning

 

  – by Amanda Barnes Cook, P.hd

 

Even for parents with no intention of introducing a pacifier (whether to give the child the chance to learn to self-soothe, or to allow for the best breastfeeding outcomes), the difficulty of Real Life often intervenes.  For us, Real Life reared its head on the first night of our son’s life, when he was placed under phototherapy lights for mild jaundice.  The nurse told us, “We are a Baby Friendly Hospital and do not provide pacifiers because they can interfere with the establishment of breastfeeding.  But unofficially, every baby under phototherapy lights should really have one.  It’s the only thing that will comfort them.”  If you’re unfamiliar with phototherapy lights, the baby is placed on a hard plastic bed in a diaper and a little eye mask.  There is no cuddling.  It is a newborn torture machine.  After getting reprimanded by nurses for trying to hold him while placing him under the lights, we gave him a pacifier.  Instant relief.  And thus began three years, almost to the day, of an intense pacifier love affair.

At first, pacifiers are cute and mostly unproblematic.  There is some annoyance caused by inconvenience.  For example, the pacifier falls out of the unskilled sucker’s mouth so often that it seems to defy the laws of physics.  They seem to get lost all too often, which is easily remedied by buying dozens and keeping them around the house in strategic locations.  Later, there is the annoyance of a happily sleeping baby in a crib who wakes up needing nothing but the pacifier, which has fallen through the bars of the crib and to the floor. (“Should I go pop it back in, or you?” my husband and I would often say.) The pacifier-loving baby in infancy often acquires the pacifier as a literal appendage—hanging off his or her clothing on a little tether, ready for use at any moment, safe from the germs of the floor.

For us, this view of pacifiers as great, if mildly inconvenient, started to change when our son was about a year and a half old.  Suddenly, he seemed more like a toddler, and less like a baby.  The pacifier seemed slightly inappropriate, out of place.  As he began to speak, the pacifier muddled his words.  Instead of others thinking it cute, we now seemed to sense that they thought he was “getting too old.”  The pacifier, we now realized, was going to have to be gotten rid of.  But how?

From this first change of perspective about the pacifier, I knew that I wasn’t willing to just take it away.  The pacifier was his method of self-soothing.  To take it away by force seemed cruel.  We had expected the pacifier to help him cope with sadness, frustration, and separation for so long, and now we would inflict sadness and frustration on him by taking it away?  The dominant pacifier narrative of our culture started to creep into my subconscious.  But what about his teeth? I thought.  But what about his language development? Around age 2, we decided to limit his pacifier use to the upstairs of our house, but not to limit his use of it beyond that.  If he wanted it, he could have it at any time, but only if he was willing to go upstairs to get it.  We sat down for a little family meeting, explained the new rule, and enjoyed a relatively seamless transition to having pacifiers only upstairs.  (Of course, he tested limits.  He would try to sneak downstairs with it while covering his mouth, or hide under the table with it.  We would joke about it, and then calmly enforce the limit.  If he was sick or especially sad, we would tell him, “You can have an exception and bring it downstairs.”  Soon thereafter he started asking us to “Make an exception, mama!” In short, our pacifier rule provided all sorts of good lessons in learning about how limits work, and I dare you not to smile when a two year old asks you to make an “exception”!)

After 24 months, I started thinking more and more about the inevitable End of the Pacifier.  How were we going to do it?  How were we going to take it away?  I started researching parenting strategies for “respectfully” taking away the pacifier.  All of them immediately struck me as profoundly disrespectful.  One oft-used strategy suggests having the Paci Fairy visit the house to take away the pacifiers and leave a gift.  Another suggests forcing the child to “give” his or her pacifiers to a newborn who “really needs them.”  But what lessons is this teaching? Most prominently, taking away the pacifier is telling your child that they are “big” and can no longer be the baby.  It tells them you don’t trust them to give it up in their own time.  It tells them you don’t believe they have the skills to grow without being forced to.  It tells them you don’t think their self-directed timeline of readiness is adequate.  It tells them that their needs are illegitimate.  It teaches them to redirect their anger at this loss (which, in their small lives, is a pretty profound loss) at another object—the Fairy, the unsuspecting newborn who just became a thief.  It teaches them to substitute a gift for their grief.  “Don’t feel bad, here’s a toy.”  I know that the intentions of parents who use these methods are good.  But we need to consider the implications.

I  read that most children give up the pacifier on their own between the age of 3 and 4.  At two, at two and a half, at two and three quarters, I simply could not believe that my son would ever willingly give it up.  It made me anxious.  It made me feel like a failure.  Our doctor would ask about pacifier use and I would mumble an answer and try not to seem like a permissive parent whose actions were allowing her son to develop lifelong tooth problems.

And then I made what seemed to be a radical decision.  I would trust my son.  End of story, that’s my plan.  Trust my son.  With dozens of pacifiers in our house, we would take no more action.  We wouldn’t buy more, but we would take no positive steps to wean him.

As age 3 approached, he slowly became uninterested in pacifiers with cracks in them, whereas before he would suck them intently no matter their condition.  Instead of hoarding as many as he could locate, he started seeking out the uncracked ones.  One day he told me, “We should give my cracked babas away to kids who like cracked babas.”  Another day, I watched him throw a cracked pacifier away.  “You know, we’re not going to buy any more pacifiers.  If you throw it away, the garbage truck will take it away and it will be gone.”  He thought, and then took it out of the trash and asked me to wash it.  On his third birthday, as the number of uncracked pacifiers had dwindled to one, he couldn’t locate the uncracked one, and sat in bed sucking on a couple cracked ones that we had found.  The look in his eyes said, “It’s just not the same.”  He sighed, threw them on the floor, and said, “I don’t like babas these days.”  He fell asleep that night without a pacifier, for the first time ever.  Later that night, he woke up, in a frenzy.  He was half asleep, but it was clear he wanted a pacifier.  I managed to find the last pacifier, and when he started sucking on it, he immediately fell back into a deep sleep.

The next morning, I noticed a crack in the last pacifier.  Later that day, we couldn’t locate it.  This is it, I thought.  What is going to happen?! All my old anxieties bubbled to the surface. At bedtime, he couldn’t find the pacifier, and lay in bed with three cracked ones.  I lay with him, even though we don’t usually stay as he falls asleep.  That night, as he struggled to fall asleep, I watched him grow up a little bit.  He tried sucking on each one, and spit each out.  He lined them up in front of his mouth like a little train.  He tried to hug them like a bear.  He tried, in a last ditch effort, to suck on the backs and on the sides.  Finally, he sat up, pulled up his pillow, put the pacifiers under the pillow, put the pillow back, took a deep sigh, and fell asleep.

He has not mentioned his pacifiers again. For three nights, he woke in the night and needed some comfort to fall back asleep.  And that was it.  All my anxiety, all my worry.  It was him—all him.  And it was beautiful.