FSID now recommends that a dummy be offered when settling the baby to sleep from one month to 6 months of age

[gagarin]

So - what do we all think about this - does safety outweigh not liking dummies or the idea of dummies?

You can read the research on

www.fsid.org.uk/editpics/612-1.pdf

I'd just like to point out that it is normal for a newborn to be on the breast all the time. Unlike a bottle fed baby they only get around a teaspoon at a time, so they need to constantly feed. Even when they are not taking anything that time is really important because it is stimulating your hormones.

I'm not knocking your decision because you made the best one for you at the time. I can understand being exhausted and needing sleep, sometimes we have to put ourselves first.

I thought that bf newborns got just as much milk from bf-ing as ff-newborns did. They both can only take as much as their stomachs can hold which is usually not very much as newborns only have small stomachs.

2 of mine wouldnt have them
1 did

I dont mind either way

Neither of mine had dummies. ds1 never sucked his thumb, ds2 does. Both are still bf, but ds1 no more than once or twice a day now.

When ds2 was born I contacted FSID about the dummy issue, as I was reluctant to give one and (having read the research) supposed frequent night bf and cosleeping would have a similar physiologically protective effect, but got an actually quite unhelpful reply.

The article I've quoted from on Hunker's site adviced in normal healthy babies they not be recommended.

I say this as a mother who offered dummies to both children in desperation. DS never really was keen, found his thumb in preference to the offered dummy early on and is sat next to me cuddling his comfort toy and thumb plugged into mouth.

DD couldn't be without her dummy for the last five months, after starting to take it around 4-6 weeks however I made an executive decision to take it away after seeing a friends 2yr old DD who had it permanently plugged in who hardly said a word. It was no problem to get rid of it in fact, DD barely noticed and I think it has cut down on night time wakings as she was waking for the dummy.

I do think they have a place but for us feeding was already established and DD has always been very good at having decent gaps between feeds. I think it can sometimes be hard to distinguish between when babies want to comfort suck and when they are hungry. This must be how they impact negatively on breastfeeding?

Both mine have/had dummies. I never never never never never give either of them a dummy outside the house, but DS1 will have his to sleep (falls out within about 10mins and no need to give it back to him- even as a baby), DS2 settles with it too. Sometimes without.

They are good devices for overtired children, but I am definitely plotting the arrival of the 'dummy fairy' this coming 3rd birthday in May to take DS1's away, and replace with a nice toy/ something to play with in the garden.

Also, with DS1, I insist I do not understand a word he is saying if he does try to speak with it in, so he takes it out. I therefore think have avoided the problems with him having it constantly 'plugged' in his mouth, and any issues with speech. Now, teeth... that remains to be seen. Fingers crossed!

DD was born in Scandinavia. Within about 3 hours of her being born the nurse had provided us with 5 dummies. They said then (3yrs ago) that it prevented SIDS, helped them sleep better and relaxed them.
She had it until 18months for nap and sleep and to prevent car sickness (she rear faced as per Scandinavian guidelines until aged 2). It took 3 days to wean her off it.
If we ever have number 2, then we will use a dummy again.

Tinkerbelles Mum, I realise that newborns need to feed very frequently to up your milk supply, but my DD would suck her thumb if my nipple or a dummy was not in her mouth. I fed my DD every 2 hours (almost an hour at a time) for nearly 4 months so she had plenty of milk from me! I always put my DD first before myself but there comes a point where if you do not put them down and get some sleep you will collapse and that is not good for anyone!

Oh, can I have a dummy for dd now??? She's only 11, it may not be too late to wean her off the fingers?

My mother said that she doesn't want me to give my baby 'one of those awful dummies - they just look so unsightly'. I told her that quite frankly my baby is not a fashion accessory and should a dummy make him/her happier then he/she shall have one (said child isn't born yet and she's already trying to take over!). I sucked my thumb until I was 18, sorry but that just isn't right, if I had had a dummy I don't believe for a second that it would've taken 18 years to give up!

Breastmilk comes out a lot slower than milk (formula or ebm) from a bottle so a baby will stop when they are full as it is more obvious to them (think about when you eat too fast and end up over full) and also there is no way for an adult to make them take more. I know some parents are concientious and watch for signs their baby has had enough, but normally you are told how much they should be having and it's not uncommon for people to try to push the last bit.

A newborn stomach holds 1 teaspoon full, how many parents can say they give that much at a time?

BreeVanDerCampLGJ, dummy comes from "dummy tit" a horrid phrase! It means a fake breast more than anything to do with the child. In parts of NA they call bottles dummies.

BreeVanDerCampLGJ you are right, but babies don't comfort suck as much as people think and it is an important part of breastfeeding because it still stimulates the release of prolactin and oxytocin.

twinkleymum I hope you understand that's what I was saying. There does come a point where it's "me or the baby" and a stressed out Mum isn't any good for the baby. I went for a three day nurse-in, 45 minutes on the breast, 15 off. Day and night. I had to have my food cut for me and put on a pile of cushions next to me whilst Tink was on another the other side. I moved in with my parents at that point (I'm not sure if it was because of that or something else now) and they would hold her while she screamed the house down so I could go to the toilet. We slept in a single bed with her attached all night, I'd wake up occasionally and turn over (I have a bad back and lying on my side is very painful). So I can understand how you get to that point, I think if I wasn't so opposed to dummies I may have given one!

A lot of my opposition has come from a. I don't think that it is natural, b. I've seen older kids doing tricks with them c. my nephew was kissed by someone with a coldsore and ended up in hospital with a bad case of herpes in his throat, it was passed to the rest of the kids because you can't stop them sharing, especially when they're just caring about a younger sibling and the hospital said that the dummy had contributed to how bad it had got. Plus I can only remember my youngest sister being a baby and her babyhood seemed very AP to me now (no dummies, breastfed for a long time, late weaned, cloth nappies, sling) of course it was just the time we were kids, but it did stay with me.

Ooops, I meant:

flossish you are right, but babies don't comfort suck as much as people think and it is an important part of breastfeeding because it still stimulates the release of prolactin and oxytocin.

So do you all think that the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths has sold out to the dummy lobby and that it is OK to disregard their SIDS advice relating to dummies?

From Berolina: "I contacted FSID about the dummy issue, as I was reluctant to give one and (having read the research) supposed frequent night bf and cosleeping would have a similar physiologically protective effect, but got an actually quite unhelpful reply"

This is not the first time I have heard of unhelpful replies from the FSID with regard to bfing/cosleeping and dummies.

One HV who is also a BFC attended a workshop by the FSID on cot death and this issue arose. She observed that the presenter was dismissive to the idea of breastfeeding as a whole. When she felt it was necessary to mention that dummies can interfere with the establishment of breastfeeding, she found her openly hostile to breastfeeding and she ended up having quite a discussion on the floor with what she thought was very misleading ideas about dummies/cot death and breastfeeding in general. It makes me wonder how even at seminars like this which HVs attend with the best intention, they can leave with only part of the story, especially when it comes from an organisation who most would expect to be givin out unbiased and reliable information regarding infant care.

I found all this information out after I posted on a list-serv about the protective effects of dummies for a friend who is due in June and has been very anxious about SIDS but at the same time worried about offering a dummy too.

FSIDS is an independant organisation that relies on money from donations. It is not as commonly thought, a government agency or department. Why should we trust a study sponsored by an interested party? It is the same as trusting Cow & Gate (first one that came to my head) to study how formula feeding is good for a baby.

My son is 8mo and has never taken to dummies - he doesn't suck his thumb either. He is a demon breastfeeder though!

10p is donated i think from the sale of 3.95 i pay/dd pays ,fsid dont get a lot of money from donations compared to some charitys,but the help my dd and us have had from this charity is priceless,it takes a lot of dummys to be sold to pay for it ,they have nowhere near enough monitors for reassurrence to parents who suffered a cot death. beleve me i would have sat all night holding a dummy to my grandsons mouth if it could have saved jayden,i for one would do anything i could to raise money for this. cot death no one knows why it happens, it leaves you numb believe me sixteen months ago stood in a room full of people trying to save my grandson,hes gone and hopeflly one dy i willknow why

"Loads of people tell you that the baby will get "addicted" to a dummy and will wake up every hour (or whatever) needing it replaced."

actually that is one of the reasons people have speculated that it decreases the risk of cot death - because you check the baby more often, or it wakes the baby more often.

I offered all my DCs a dummy, it is a comfort to them and if it helps to keep them safe then that is a bonus too.

DS1 had his for 5 months until he got a cold and couldn't breathe through his nose. He didn't miss it so I didn't give it back.

DS2 had his for 3.5 years (although only for naps).

DD not keen and as soon as she found her thumb she would not take the dummy at all.

BTW, before the age of 1 I never had to go to my DSs due to their dummy falling out, it never bothered them!

Tinkerbellesmum - I don't wholly agree with some of the things you are saying. Only from a layperson's point of view and my own experiences of feeding my children as I've not bf-ing training so I'm not saying I'm right just that some of the things you are saying don't ring true with my experiences.

I?m not sure that bm always comes out slower than milk from a bottle. Surely that depends on the teat and how fast the milk can flow. Some of my bf babies have ended up spluttering as the milk shot out and I could hear them gulping it down. I have urged a bf baby to ?just take a bit more?. Also, when bottlefeeding, I?ve been advised to use a teat with a bigger hole as the baby was working so hard to get the milk (not a newborn though).
While I do think that some babies don?t know when they are full, there isn?t much point feeding them too much as ime they just sick it all back up.
Generally I could tell when my babies had had enough, they were reluctant to suck and mostly fell asleep.

?A newborn stomach holds 1 teaspoon full, how many parents can say they give that much at a time??
Not sure about this. I know that their stomachs are only small but they can definitely take more than a teaspoon full.

While I agree that the more a baby sucks the more beneficial it is for the release of hormones, I also think that some babies do comfort suck quite a bit. You can tell the difference in that a hungry baby won?t be pacified with a dummy.

As regards the three day nurse in. I don?t think that is an option for many people particularly when they have other children. Think you were lucky with that one
Many mothers have to get on with the day to day life of a family and a dummy can be a godsend in those situations. I hope that mothers reading your post don't think that it would be essential to have time to do a nurse-in to enable you to breastfeed as ime it isn't. If possible, I used to de-stress at the loooong evening feed after the other children had gone to bed. I'd curl up with the baby and settle into a chair for as long as we both wanted.

As you can probably tell, I don?t mind dummies at all. Some of mine have had them and some haven?t. They have been a comfort to them and I don?t see any harm in that. As someone else said, if they can help prevent sids then that?s a bonus. If not, then I?m quite happy for them to get some comfort from them and a break for me.

Not all babies go on a three day nurse in, mine was very tiny and when on a growth spurt she needed to spend more time on. I know I was fortunate to have my family helping, which is why I said I can understand that it can get to a person that they need to do something like give a dummy.

A baby will hold 1 teaspoon, that's been found (I'm trying to remember who the resource is that we taught that came from, but it's certainly in my manual) but stomachs do stretch. To put it into an adult persepective, we can hold about double the size of our fist but it's not uncommon for any of us to eat more than that. If you have ever looked into the Paul McKenna diet he talks about eating slowly because it gives our stomach chance to know when it's full.

There are times when breastmilk comes out fast, but it's speed varies through the course of a meal and it's only a very short time that it comes that fast. Bottles come at the same pace and certainly it is less work than feeding from the breast. It's why a bottlefed baby can go longer between feeds than a breastfed baby.

I did say not all parents feed like that, please don't think that I see bottlefeeding parents as being uncaring and pushing milk down a baby. I've had to do formula because of having a premature baby and then she didn't grow for a month (6lb 2oz from 2.5 months for four weekly weigh-ins) so I don't have any bad feelings towards formula feeding. Between being mum to a 31 weeker, researching what was happening to us at each stage because of that and training to work with the NHS I have got a lot of information stored up.

BTW harpsi, they say that dummies save lives in babies who use them when they are kept in all night, see the UNICEF link someone posted.

hazygirl, I didn't lose my daughter to cot death - I just went into an unstoppable labour at 20 weeks which she survived unaided for 3 hours - but I can understand what you say. I go through the last 27 hours I was in labour and think about what I could have done differently, how I should have begged for a second opinion... I hear of babies smaller surviving and think maybe I should have begged them to save her. It's all so clear, I don't have a memory like it. It's so clear I can almost change the events of that night. I can appreciate how you feel, I know I would have done whatever it took to keep Lily-Hope alive a bit longer. My heart goes out to you and your family, it breaks for every lost baby.

"It's why a bottlefed baby can go longer between feeds than a breastfed baby."

Apart from the first few days when they seemed to be permanently attached, some of my babies did go 3hrs+ between feeds although they still had bursts of feeding frenzies during growth spurts. I thought this was about the same as ff babies. I know that this was similar to when I ff my eldest from 3m. My sister who ff always seemed to offer her babies a bottle as frequently as I offered a breast in the early days. Again just my experience.

My babies were all bf, rejected dummies, never sucked their thumbs, never got attached to any security object.

All they wanted was to use me as a human dummy and would wake many times in the night (as often as once an hour) to comfort feed, long after they ceased needing to feed at night. Case-in-point, my 18 month co-sleeping old ds. It was the same with dd.

If they would take a dummy, my life (and sleep) would be much easier.

I agree with all kiskidee says about FSID failing to highlight enough about the protective effects of bf-ing and co-sleeping. Which should be given equal, if not higher, billing than the use of dummies.