Why oh why did I start with this **%%$!! dummy - just gone back in for 100th time

[sunshine17]

DD1 wouldn't take a dummy - and looking back now I'm glad because my friends with babies her age are still trying to wean them off.

In a moment of madness I started with DD2 who is now 8 weeks old.

I've just gone back into her room for what must be the 10th time to 'plug' it back in to try and get her to have her lunchtime nap. She screams and wakes herself up if it's not in.

I so so regret starting as I can see it becoming a big (bigger!) problem. In fact the few times she's been in such a deep sleep that she doesn't want it she has slept so well.

What can I do - please help. The other problem is I can't let her cry for too long as it wakes DD1 (19 months).

[pudding25]

Smellyeli you sound like you are going through exactly the same as me.
Day 4 today. Morning nap, settled after about 4 mins of crying and slept for 30 mins. lunchtime, wailed and wailed on and off for about 40 mins with us sitting with her, leaving her for a bit etc etc. Eventually, took her out for a walk and she eventually slept for 1hr.
This afternoon, 15 mins in car.
Not enough napping time during the day.

6.30pm cried put twice when I put her in cot, shoved in her fingers and not heard from her for 36 mins and counting. I am on the edge of my seat waiting for her to start wailing.

If she can self settle this well from now on, I will be over the moon (although will probably have misshapen teeth from sucking her fingers!).

For anyone thinking of giving a dummy to a tiny baby, I still swear by it, even though it is not so easy at the moment. DD was a very sucky baby. If she had been on my boob 24/7, I would have given up bf or ended up with pnd I reckon. Also, from quite a young age, she started having quite good naps and having a bedtime routine, going to sleep at 7pm. The dummy helped her do this. Everyone else I know who managed to get any sort of routine for their dc left them to cry and I was not prepared to leave her even for 5 mins when she was tiny. Using the dummy meant that I didnt need to. It also meant that when we were out and about, if she started moaning, I could give her the dummy and not have a huge stress out.
Now, I know people are going to come on here and say that a baby doesnt need a routine - well, each to their own, but for me, some semblance of a routine was really important for my own sanity and dd thrives on a routine already.
Now that she is bigger, she can be distracted with toys/tv/funny faces etc and it is easier to not have the dummy. It was also disturbing her sleep which was the main reason I wanted to get rid of it.

[MatNanPlus]

She should start to sleep more in the day as she self settles.

If baby sucks on 1 hand only then i find if helpful to place my hand of that side of the head which is upper most and they tend to unwind really quickly and nod off, current baby still sometimes needs this at 6m when over tired but not other times, she has never had a dummy and found her thumb at 9 weeks old.

[smellyeli]

Good tip MNP - I shall try that for naps.

Pudding, I think our babies must be pretty similar! Tonight - 2 minutes of crying and now fast asleep - yippee.

I agree about routine, it's really helped me to have a rough outline of the day, helped her to get into a good feeding pattern and given me confidence in meeting her needs I agree that without the dummy for the first few weeks it would have been tougher - and DS might not have bonded so well with her either - so don't be put off dummies by reading this thread. Just know that there seems to be a right time to get rid of them if you don't want them to become a semi-permanent feature, and that it's not too traumatic as long as you pick your moment......

[pudding25]

I am hoping dd self settles better in day soon.
I heard her cry at 10.20pm then heard her sucking her fingers and go back to sleep - she woke 30 mins later and I was due to feed her anyway but I would normally have had to rush in and shove in dummy.
Fingers crossed for tomorrow.
Maybe one day she may even sleep through the night (before she is 21).

[smellyeli]

Only one waking last night - 5am - and went back down straight away, heard her at 6 but didn't go in and the next thing I knew it was 7.20! Yes, I'm hoping she might go through the night at some point - I was being a bit more ambitious and thinking it might be before she goes to school??

So now I have to decide when to actually get rid of the dummies altogether, and what to do with them? Ceremonial burning? Flush down toilet??

[MatNanPlus]

Into a box in the back of the cupboard

[ajm200]

Take the dummy away now while your lo is still very small. You might have a unsettled day or two but at 8 weeks babies soon forget.

We gave DS a dummy to stop his thumbsucking at around 5 months and took it away again a couple of weeks later when his sleep pattern had become a nightmare because he kept losing the dummy. Even at that age we only suffered for a week.

Recently, my mum gave him a fire engine toy to take to bed, don't know why, he kept losing it down the back of the cot and screaming. It really disturbed his sleep so we took it away.. two months later he still moans and whines at bedtime about ne na car..
It really is better to stop this now than later

[ajm200]

Bin them all... then you won't be tempted to give in.

[dizzyg]

DD is 3.5 and has her dummy at night only but has been a nightmare to get to this stage and I am trying to get rid of it completley b4 baby comes in jan, dont want to use dummy for this one, but it did work wonders for dd when she was little and i had it on a clip so she could put it back her self, get them in boots, but think plan thats best is to get rid of dummy at young age or as soon as you think you can then you wont have the battle I have on a nightly basis!!

[GreenMonkies]

"I've just gone back into her room for what must be the 10th time to 'plug' it back in "

If she's right next to you then why do you have to go to her room to plug it back in?

OK, in response to the "preaching" issue. The seperate sleeping and night waking and need for dummy re-insertion are all part of the same issue.

At this age, and for several more months, perhaps even a year, night waking and needing to be soothed off to sleep is normal. The concept of babies settling themselves off to sleep alone in a cot is very new and completely unnatural. Babies instinctively need to be held and rocked and in close proximity with thier mothers/care-givers, a dummy merely gives them something to suck on, and is a poor substitute for the kind of attention they are really in need of. To expect to be able to put a baby of 8 weeks old down in a moses basket and walk away and have baby fall asleep is ridiculous. Wonderfully convenient it may be, but it is not normal or natural for a baby to do this.

I am not saying that no one should use a dummy, but they should be used as the "breast substitute" that they are, not as something that is given to the baby for long periods. Babies and toddlers that are not breast-fed still have "non-nutritive" sucking needs, and used carefully a dummy can be very good for comforting etc.

I always approach everything using breastfeeding as the baseline, so, if you look at the way a breastfeeding baby/toddler goes to sleep it's generally (unless they have been "trained" not to) whilst they are nursing. For a non-breastfeeding baby, the dummy is the "nurse-to-sleep" replacement. As such, even co-sleeping breastfed babies don't actually hold thier mothers nipple in thier mouth all night (unless they are teething or poorly), once baby is asleep mum normally slips her nipple from the babies mouth and baby carries on sleeping. As far as I'm concerned theres no reason why you can't do this with a dummy too. If you rock your baby off to sleep (or stay with her whilst she's in the cot) and then gentley remove the dummy once she's asleep, you should be able to keep the dummy without having to get up in the night to replace it several times.

This way you can keep the dummy, because it is useful for calming and soothing a tired cranky baby, and the need to suck is still there until they are two or three, but they don't actually need to have it in thier mouth the whole time they are asleep. You may find she wakes up a bit to begin with if she's used to having the dummy all night, but if you keep it up, give her the dummy to go back to sleep, slide it out once she's off, she will get the hang of sleeping without it, even though she still has it to go to sleep.

[GreenMonkies]

And for those who are, or are considering leaving thier babies to cry for any amount of time to get them to "learn" to sleep etc, why not read this

particularly this part;

"?Cry it out?

Advocates of this method make it sound so easy: A few nights of crying, and your baby will be sleeping all night, every night. If only it were so simple! My research has shown that very few parents experience this effortless success. Many deal with weeks of crying for hours each night (for baby and parent, in many instances.) Some have babies who cry so violently that they vomit. Some parents find that the nighttime crying affects their babies' daytime personalities ? making them clingy and fussy. Many find that any setback (teething, sickness, missing a nap) sends them back to their night waking problems, and they find they must let their babies cry it out over and over again. Many (if not all) parents who resort to letting their babies cry it out do so because they believe that it is the only way they will get their babies to sleep through the night."

and this bit;

?Babies are people, extremely helpless, vulnerable, and dependent people. Your baby counts on you to lovingly care for her. When she cries, she is signaling ? in the only way she knows how ? that she needs you to be with her.

?You know what it feels like to cry in fear or distress. It feels terrible. And it's no different for your baby. When your baby cries he experiences physical changes. His blood pressure rises, his muscles become tense, and stress hormones flood his little body.

?Babies who are subjected to 'cry it out' sleep training do sometimes sleep deeply after they finally drop off. This is because babies and young children frequently sleep deeply after experiencing trauma. This deep sleep shouldn't be viewed as proof of the efficacy of the [cry it out] method but rather evidence of one of its many disturbing shortcomings.?

Dr. William Sears, in Nighttime Parenting: How to Get Your Baby and Child to Sleep (La Leche International, 1999), says that letting a baby cry it out creates ?detachment parenting? and goes so far as to warn parents against this approach:

?Parents, let me caution you. Difficult problems in child rearing do not have easy answers. Children are too valuable and their needs too important to be made victims of cheap, shallow advice.?

How does a baby feel about crying it out?

No one truly knows how crying it out affects a baby. After all, one cannot raise a baby twice and note the difference. And no one really knows how a baby feels when he is left to cry it out. Jean Liedloff presents a likely perception in her volume on anthropology, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost (Addison-Wesley, 1977.) Here, she describes a baby waking in the middle of the night:

?He awakes in a mindless terror of the silence, the motionlessness. He screams. He is afire from head to foot with want, with desire, with intolerable impatience. He gasps for breath and screams until his head is filled and throbbing with the sound. He screams until his chest aches, until his throat is sore. He can bear the pain no more and his sobs weaken and subside. He listens. He opens and closes his fists. He rolls his head from side to side. Nothing helps. It is unbearable. He begins to cry again, but it is too much for his strained throat; he soon stops. He waves his hands and kicks his feet. He stops, able to suffer, unable to think, unable to hope. Then he falls asleep again.?

Food for thought.........

[pudding25]

Do you know what, greenmonkies, there is tons of research which states the opposite about crying methods. I don't agree with crying it out where you just leave a baby anyway but there are tons of other ways to get a baby to settle.

As I have said before to you greenmonkies each to their own. You obviously are very set in your ways and believe that your way is the only way. I don't agree that a baby has to be attached to their mother 24/7 to grow up contented and happy. All the children I know have been left to cry (checked on regularly) for even a short time at some point and they are all happy and well adjusted children.
My baby has now got rid of her dummy with a minimum of crying. Yes, she is 16 wks old and sleeps in her own room (since she was 13wks) and would you believe it, has napped in her room since she was little. She is the happiest, most loved little baby and I find it quite insulting that you are insinuating again that unless a child is attachment parented, then there are going to be problems.

Furthermore, what I keep seeing again and again, both from people I know and reading post on this site, is that parents who have not put their children in any kind of sleeping/feeding routine are at a later age (e.g 1yr) saying how they can't take it any more and how can they get their child to sleep through the night etc etc

The thing that has irritated me most since having a baby is people who feel that it is their way or the highway.
If you want to attchment parent, great but stop with the preaching when it has not been asked for.

[pudding25]

Back to ditching the dummy...

DD is now dummy free! She is settling well and is sucking her fingers instead! But the important thing - and the reason why we got rid of the dummy- is that she has started to sleep much more soundly. She has not been disturbing her sleep by waking up all the time - greenmonkies talks of babies who are clingy and fussy as they have had to cry - well, dd is now much happier during the day as she is getting a much better sleep. Babies need decent sleep to enable them to grow and develop.

I don't agree with just leaving a baby to cry it out and I wouldnt leave my dd when she was tiny to cry at all. However, the way I did it,which involved minimal crying definitely worked. I was with her for most of the time.

[LittlePushka]

Just a personal opinion but..here goes...

I have used dummies for sleep/settling with both my children (never to stop them crying). Both were exclusively breastfed for at least 12 weeks, one much longer. I always have used MAM newborn dummies whatever the ageof the child because the teat is flattened, as is the nipple is in a natural sucking.

I always keep the dummy in the bedroom where they slept/nap or have one to had if they will be out at nap time. I also put LO's down with a soft toy to hold/cuddle.

When I felt that it was no longer needed with DS1 I stopped giving it at nap times for a few times. Then one night I just did not give it to him...he did express concern but i told him his toy did not have a dummy and he was a big boy now. He never asked for one thereafter and does not take his little brothers.

I do believe they have a rightful place in caring for babies if they are used for a specific purpose and in a controlled way. Certainly they invaluable as comfort throughout VERY difficult teething times for DS1. I struggle with the thing about "weaning" LO's off dummies...I think that the dummy in in the control of an adult not a child.

I think that there is a time to move away from the dummy. I would never be prescriptive as to when that might be,...though I do hate to see LO's talking through them.

There,...a PRO-DUMMY post!

[LittlePushka]

PS Neither child has had sleep issues,..both sleep minimum of 11 hours and have done since they were 10-12 weeks.

[LittlePushka]

PPS They dont fush well down the toilet, they float. Great if you ae potty training little boys!

[LittlePushka]

PPS They dont fush well down the toilet, they float. Great if you ae potty training little boys!

[ethanchristopher]

allow her to go to sleep with it but take it out when she is sleeping so she wakes up without it.

at meal times take the dummy away and replace with food immediately then hide the dummy

this is what i did and i only gave it back when he had remembered and started to cry and eventually he started to forget to remember and finally never asked again (touch wood)

[MatNanPlus]

Great advise ethanchristopher EXCEPT said baby is 8 weeks old so bit early for that.

greenmonkies that was a very familiar posting, you must have that ready to copy and paste as i seemed to have read it before.

[TinkerBellesMum]

Just like to respond to the comment about babies who aren't put into a routine. Mine wasn't, I'm far too lazy to force an issue like that! She had found a routine for herself by four months that she is still in 22 months later, with slight adjustments to new activities. I've never regretted anything I've done for one minute.

Just thought I'd make sure there is at least one parent on this site who isn't regretting anything.

[pudding25]

I am not saying that everyone should have a routine, I am very much for everyone doing what makes them happiest - I should have said in my post that for some people who have not put their babies in a routine, then they have problems.
You are right that some babies find their own routines, but not all do, and it is those ones I was talking about, with the parents who are stressed out of their minds and super sleep deprived and asking for help.
For me, a routine of some sort was the only way to go as otherwise, I think I would have ended up with pnd. I need to have some idea of what I am doing otherwise I get very stressed out.

Well dummy ditching day 6 now. DD is amazing. Dummy totally forgotten about and she is sleeping so much better and deeper. She even went from 7pm to 5.30am last night (with a dreamfeed thrown in at 11pm). I couldnt believe it. I actually heard her wake at 5am, grumble for a minute and then go back to sleep. Not getting my hopes up as this may be a one off. I fed her at 5.30am and she went back to sleep until 7am! I am so glad we plucked up the courage to get rid if the dummy as I was dreading it.

[MatNanPlus]

Well Done Pudding25

[GreenMonkies]

MatNanPlus, It's taken from the No Cry Sleep Solution website, (as linked) so you may have read it before.

Pudding, I am not saying they have to be held 24/7, and please do show me the research that says leaving a baby to cry is not harmful, I'd love to read it.

[ajm200]

Well Done Pudding25

[pudding25]

greenmonkies If you look on the internet, you can find evidence for and against everything.

As I have already said, I don't agree with letting a baby cry by themselves. I myself, did not even do cc with dd and only left her by herself to cry for 5 mins at a time (and she only needed to for a very short period). It certainly has done her no harm. She has been the happiest baby ever and today, slept 2 hrs at lunchtime which she has never done and awoke totally refreshed and happy.

CC also has its place if the parents can do it. From everything I have read, and from all the people I know who have done it, results are quick and their children are very happy afterwards and well rested with happy parents who get some sleep. A happy parent means a happy child.
So if breastfeeding on demand, co-sleeping, carrying baby around makes you happy, then great and I really mean that. However, you need to understand that many people would not want to do that and their children are very happy and well adjusted. Personally, if I had needed to BF dd all day and all night all the time still, I would have given up a long time ago. She doesnt need to be fed/comforted on the breast all the time. Instead, at almost 4 mths, I am still mainly BF her and will continue to do so.

The Centre for Community Child Health, Royal Children?s Hospital, Melbourne recently completed a review of recent research into sleep problems in young children.

What has been researched?
Research covers a range of approaches to managing settling and waking problems in children over six months old, including:

Behavioural strategies for teaching children to fall asleep on their own rather than with the assistance of an adult.
Medical treatment involving the use of either trimazeprazine or niaprazine at night to treat sleep problems.
A combined approach involving the use of medication along with a behavioural strategy.
Providing information and advice about sleep, with or without support visits.
What has the research found (in a nutshell)?
Behavioural strategies have been found to be the most successful in dealing with sleeping problems. Research has shown that the behavioural strategies most likely to be effective include: creating a positive routine, controlled comforting (or controlled crying), systematic ignoring and scheduled waking. The strategy known as 'camping out' has also been researched.

Is controlled comforting harmful?
Despite concerns about potential harms to the baby, no studies published in peer-reviewed journals have shown any psychological or physical harm from using controlled comforting (or other behaviour management techniques described on this site). In fact, recent research has shown that babies who have undergone controlled comforting are more likely to sleep better in the short-term and are as well adjusted as their peers in terms of behaviour and sleep in the long-term.