Reflections on Thumb-Sucking

I only had one thumb-sucker, so I can’t claim to be an expert. But here are some of my observations.

It was harder for my thumb-sucker to stop sucking his thumb than it was for my other child to give up his pacifier. I know there are kids who hold onto their pacifiers for years, but popping a needle in the gummy part or simply taking it away early enough (at least, during the daytime) can go a long way towards parting a baby and his friend.

You can’t get rid of your thumb.

For this reason, I suggest figuring out a plan of action early for your thumb-sucker. Are you willing to wait until he or she gives it up on their own? What if they don’t? It seems to me that babies who are really easy babies and suck their thumb may be easy for that reason–that their thumb really calms them down. If this is the case (i.e. the baby sucks his or her thumb out of the baby and young toddler year and into their second and third year), you may have trouble getting your child to stop. They are not just sucking their thumb for oral gratification or sucking needs, as all infants have, but they have a sensory (neural) tie to sucking–it really calms them down. It may help them organize their sensory input, find their own thoughts, disengage from something too exciting, or otherwise help them relax in a fundamental way. If this is the case, it is almost part of their make-up (NOT their identity or personality) and it may be harder for them to part with it because of the anxiety it will make them go through.

Therefore, if I had to do things over again, I would work with my son earlier to stop sucking his thumb. It got harder as time went on, and three years old was definitely too late. I think we started working with him about four months before his third birthday (because I wanted to try toilet-training him and I didn’t want to worry about hygiene so much). It was so hard. We went with the old “tape the thumb” trick, which worked fine. (And we took it off at night so he could sleep.) But he became anxious and insecure almost immediately–lots of crying spells, fears, moodiness, picky eating, etc. We weren’t trying to be mean, it just caused a lot of problems for him.

So I backed off one time and gave him a month or so of sucking again. But he was already insecure because the experience had warped him a bit… he kept thinking he wasn’t allowed to suck it. Then my husband started up with him again and kept with it until he learned. I felt bad about it, but it really was healthier for him to stop. Plus, it was clear that it wasn’t going to get any easier as time went on. It didn’t take too long for him to understand that he could suck it at night but not during the day… maybe another month or two. And for the record, he is three and a half now and still sucks it at night, and is not toilet-trained yet. And he does not have buck teeth!

So my bottom line is, the earlier the better. Make sure the child is over the teething stage, and don’t make a big deal about it until you are sure his oral-motor stage is over… whenever the child reliably stops putting things in their mouth when they are exploring their environment. Definitely sometime before two years old, he should be ready for some training. I would probably try around 15 or 16 months, when my other son pretty readily gave up his pacifier. But you know your own child. My reflections are just thinking out loud. First things first, one battle at a time, the most important ones first.

The Big Bed Question

“So when do you put your child in a bed?”

Next to, “When does your baby start sleeping through the night?” this question is probably the next most frequently asked bedtime question. And like most people, I’ll respond with the common sense answer: whenever you want to!

That said, I’ll offer some thoughts.

We’ve had four little beanies right in a row in our house, so the bed question has come up periodically throughout the last five years. As our third child is nearing the special age, I believe I have come up with an answer that I am most comfortable with: when your child finishes taking naps, he is ready. This assumes that your child fits an average situation where he or she starts giving up a nap around two-and-a-half years of age and outgrows it for sure by around three-and-a-half. This is not an iron clad rule where Absolutely No Naps must take effect at the three-and-a-half yardline, but those times where the older toddler does need a nap are for days of sickness, lots of activity, etc. It should be the exception, not the rule, and you should see the child more happily accepting a rhythm of earlier bedtime rather than naptime.

Of course, some children are exceptional and continue their naps even into the kindergarten ages.

But the thing is, if you don’t want to make keeping your child in their bed a big vigilance commitment on your part (and possibly a bone of contention on theirs), you can confine the Must Stay In Bed rule to just one period a day… nighttime, when they’re actually tired. Between two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half, most kids master the necessary skills surrounding going to bed. He or she is probably talkative, able to understand a small explanation or video about bedtime, may possibly be toileting or brushing their teeth, able to get their pj’s on by themselves or with small assistance, enjoys taking a bath, can clamber in and out of their bed, get their covers on (or off), stay in without falling over the edge, come upstairs if there is a problem/emergency, enjoys a short storytime, etc etc.

Some people are eager to get their kids into beds because they are embarrassed that someone they know (or have heard about) kept their kid in a crib until they were four. Or their kid is jumping out of it already so they figure, why bother? Other reasons include simply enjoying the excursion to a store for more grown-up furniture, wanting to encourage their child’s sense of independence, figuring a certain age is just “the age” that everyone else is getting out of their cribs, needing to use the crib for a new baby, or simply being sick of seeing the crib and/or lifting up a heavy toddler to get in it. My husband fell into this last category; I fell into the second-to-last.

Actually, I fell into this category twice. By the time my third child was impending, we had my oldest toddler in his crib with the bar off (effectively, a toddler bed), and my younger toddler still in his crib; he was only sixteen months old. I had no desire to take my younger toddler from his crib (not to mention that he probably didn’t either–he was, and still is, a creature of habit for whom adjustments are always a big deal). And I didn’t particularly want to strip my three-year-old of his toddler bed either because we had just gotten him in it and he was comfortable there. I had had dreams of putting both of them in a bunk bed and didn’t want to buy a temporary bed.

So I did what any other mom in my position would have done: nothing. I kept everybody where they were, used a pack ‘n play with our newborn, and then when I got tired of that, I bought another crib second-hand. THREE CRIBS! It sounds silly and my husband was mad at me, but I just couldn’t deal with the challenge of trying to move people around at the same time that I was nursing and trying to get another person to sleep through the night! It was like that for a year. When my younger toddler finally turned two-and-a-half, we bought the long-awaited bunk beds and put the two older kids in them, and everything was fine in Never-Never land. Then we were down to one crib. But we got the second one back out again when I had my fourth. (We sold that third one.)

If we found out tomorrow we were having a fifth, I wouldn’t hesitate to put him/her in the Pack ‘n play again until I was ready to deal with moving the next person into a big bed. Four babies down the line, it doesn’t have the significance it once did. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to be that person who kept the kid in until four, although that is not my ideal per se. I learned that having a toddler in a crib is all a matter of personal taste: how does it make you feel to have someone still in there? If it doesn’t make you feel bad, then great! Move your child when you want, or when he expresses interest. But make sure his interest is compatible with the responsibility too. If it is not convenient to move somebody, then don’t. He won’t go to college with people asking about it. (Unless he’s still in a crib by then, of course.)

Weaning

Weaning a baby can be difficult. Especially if you’re nursing. They get so attached to their food! And that’s fine, totally normal. It can even be hard for mom, who all of a sudden realizes that they are losing their “baby.” You probably have these reminders throughout the baby year as your little one crawls, gets the first teeth, and so forth. But definitely walking and weaning are the two big landmarks that denote the baby year being over.

There is nothing magical that happens at 12 month, but many moms decide to wean their baby from breast or bottle around that time. Biology dictates that the first year, more or less, is when the baby gets the most benefit from the special constitution of breastmilk or formula. Lots of moms wean before or after this time, and you should do what’s right for you and your family. I’m not going to go into the philosophy of when you should wean because people feel so differently about it. But to put it in perspective, weaning shouldn’t be the most passionate thing in your life. At some point, you just have to do it. Here are some things I learned:

If you are weaning a baby from the bottle, the easiest thing is to move their formula to a sippy cup first. Once they are ok with the sippy cup, and they are at least a year old, then start diluting the formula with milk. The pediatrician recommends whole milk, but you can use rice, soy, almond, oat, or whatever- milk. Introducing other liquids into their diet at this time (if you haven’t already) can also help… water, diluted juice, etc. This will help lessen the attachment to the formula.

When I weaned my first baby, he was on formula and I started with doing half milk, half full-strength formula in a sippy cup. You can always start with a different dilution if you want. Then when he was happy with half and half, I started diluting the amount of formula I mixed in. I think I had two scoops in a regular size sippy cup with half milk, and I then moved to just one. When he was happy with that concentration, I lowered it again until he was on just plain milk. I think I started this process at eleven months, and it took maybe until thirteen or fourteen months to get him down to normal milk. It wasn’t too difficult because he’d been on the sippy cup for several months already and I gave him formula only at mealtimes (4 times a day) so he was kind of full and happy with the taste of his food (not focused on his drink). I gave him other liquids in between meals if he needed a drink.

Another thing that helped was not falling into the “bottle before bedtime” routine. I think he would have been more sensitive to his weaning process if he’d still been getting a bottle the last thing before bed. I would suggest doing something else to pacify. I used to give some water and a “cookie” so he felt privileged instead of deprived. I did notice that in the beginning, he seemed mildly addicted to the formula so I tried to go slowly on him until his system didn’t need it anymore.

If you are weaning from the breast, you can’t dilute breastmilk (unless you are expressing it and putting it in the sippy cup), so the easiest thing to do is start cutting back the number of feedings. Save the first and last feedings of the day, for last and work on cutting down the number of feedings during the day. Some people do the sippy cup thing and if that works for you, then that’s great. I’d follow the same routine as the bottle weaning above until the toddler was on milk alone. But for most people, that is too much work and what the baby really clings to is the sensation of nursing, not just the breastmilk itself.

I weaned two of my breastfeeding babies around nine months, so the process of weaning them entailed not just getting them off the breast but onto formula. That was very tricky and I don’t recommend it. Babies know their stuff, and most of them want nothing to do with formula when the breastmilk is available. I had to slowly wean them onto formula by doing the reverse process as I described above–by giving them sippy cups of rice milk and slowly adding formula into it until they were drinking formula alone. They were just too young to take off breastmilk and put on regular milk—they needed the benefits of formula until they were a year old. (Incidentally, I weaned them because I got pregnant again and my milk supply dropped drastically, not because I didn’t want to keep nursing them.)

So hopefully you don’t have to do that. If you can wean your baby from the breast onto regular milk, you might have more luck because various milks taste more like breastmilk than formula. Sometimes babies will drink lowfat milk before they drink whole milk because the consistency and smell is more similar. Other times they take to soy or non-lactose milk, especially if it is vanilla flavored or something appealing. (You can wean out the vanilla later, pretty easily.) I started with cutting out the mid-morning feeding first because that was the easiest. I just gave food and a little soy or rice milk instead. By the afternoon, the babies really wanted to nurse again, so I kept that feeding in for quite awhile. I tried to drop the late afternoon feeding next because that was always the hardest feeding for me to do, with dinnertime approaching. I think I tried to give the baby a graham cracker and put them down for a quick nap instead. So you can see that a lot of the weaning process depends on how many times you are feeding already… I think I was generally weaning from five or six feedings a day. I dropped the first quickly, the second sort of quickly, and tried to get to three feedings (morning, noon, night) as soon as I could. It took maybe a month, and a lot of effort (substitution).

By the time I was on three feedings a day (and pregnant), my milk supply was low enough that dropping the midday feeding wasn’t too difficult. If I fed the baby solid food first and put them to the breast afterwards, there wasn’t enough milk to sustain them for more than a couple minutes anyway. They’d suck a bit and then jump off. Then I’d supplement with some more rice milk. I kept the wake-up and bedtime feedings going for at least another month just to keep peace; the baby really wanted to nurse those times and I couldn’t deal with getting off on the wrong foot in the mornings or having a huge bedtime battle in the evenings. At some point, I just started shortening the amount of time they were at the breast at those times, and I basically got it down to two minutes or something like that (followed by a real breakfast or graham cracker at night). Then the last little bit to get off completely just happened on its own. They were successfully weaned by eleven months.

My third nursing baby is still nursing, at nine months, and I am not pregnant, so I plan to keep nursing her until the year mark and wean her somewhat like the process above except without the introduction of formula. If I end up doing something different, I’ll let you know =)

You can always pray that your baby will wean itself too! I have known some moms with that situation, and they were either rejoicing or horrified =)