Why Do Pacifiers Piss So Many People Off?
Posted by JeanneSager at 5:15 PM on January 2, 2009
Oh, honey, I've been there. Not three, thankfully (there, but for the grace of you-know-who, go I). My daughter hadn't even hit the year mark, and we were getting the stares and the comments, the creepy old bats who'd reach in and yank the little dummy out of her mouth.
What is it with the pacifier that gets so many people up in arms?
When we finally realised that my daughter would use anything she could get her lips around (a finger, my nipple… ) to soothe her, we finally quelled what we had thought was a serious case of colic with a dummy. We wanted to pull the plug by six months, but when she went full bore into teething and turned up her little nose at cold washcloths, frozen bagels and rings in favor of the binky, we let her chew to her heart's content. We were closing in on the year mark when the pacifier went bye bye – even at bedtime – and despite a few hiccups, the whole house moved on.
Tsouderos had a trickier time of it – waiting until her daughter was almost three meant explaining them away with a "fairy" who had to come to take the pacifiers off to other little girls and boys. A friend claimed a mouse (they were renting an old farmhouse at the time) had snuck in during the night and carted them away.
The thing is, my daughter, Tsouderos' daughter, my friend's son, they all gave up eventually – with a little parental intervention. They will not be heading to college with them, and the ending was early enough that there is no demonstrable harm to their teeth – and with that all that soothing, absolutely non to their psyches.
So why do dummy-using parents feel so guilty that they haven't pulled the plug?
It sounds like you are also worried about pacifiers. I had three kids, and they all used pacifiers. The oldest is today a successful, well balanced lawyer. The other two are also very successful. I know one girl who must be the world’s worst mother. She refused to breast feed her kids, and makes her hapless husband feed them with cold milk made from powder. She never cleans the house and watches TV all day. She wanted to call her son Lucifer, but had daughters instead, stifling that plan. She’s a communist and thinks the mafia is a great organization. In short she’s a fruitcake. We had to sit next to her at a restaurant and put up with her crying baby. She refused to give it a pacifier. The baby started chewing on a metal tablespoon and she allowed this. The baby chewed on the spoon so hard she probably cut her gums, but that was okay. Anything but a pacifier! Where did she get this zany idea? From a bunch of 70’s feminists who believed pacifiers were bad for kids. They were wrong.