Time to ditch the dummy? Tips please

[missrose0110]

My son is 18 months old and only has his dummy for a nap during the day and on a night time. Lately he's waking up 3/4 times a night crying because he can't find his dummy. It takes 20 mins or so each time to get him back over.

Is 18 months to young to cut out a dummy? We're expecting again so want to try and improve his sleep before a new baby comes along. Otherwise I'll never sleep again 😂

Any tips of how to cut It out? Thanks.

Hi OP. I totally feel you! Total nightmare having to be up constantly when they lose it. Have you tried the dummy clips? I never used them, but it might work for you.

Santa took ours away one Christmas when my ds1 was 2! Worked straight away. Never asked for it again. I know it’s a while off, but it works well when they’re 2. It’s hard to reason with an 18mth old so we waited. Much simpler to have something else (like gifts) to distract. We told him that Santa had asked he give up the dummy in exchange for his gifts that year. So it went on xmas eve.

You could try something similar now if you think it’s time and it could work. Maybe a special treat that’s only for ‘big kids’? Anything from his own bed, or a toy he wants.

I took the dummies off DS during the day when he was around 16/17 months old then about a month later took them off him at night. I just said he was too big for them now and I collected them up and threw them away. I’ve heard of people doing dummy fairies, posting them to babies and replacing with a toy, leaving them for Santa etc so I must just be mean but taking them away was fine in our house. One or two nights of crying and unsettled but after that it was as if he’d never had them

We did it at 2. With dd we made a big deal of it going, the health visitor took it and she got a present blah blah blah. She really missed it and was quite upset.
With DS we made much less of it. Just kept binning them and saying we’ll get more when we go shopping. Eventually they were all gone, he didn’t bother at all about it.

We did it at 2 - he'd been a really poor sleeper till 18 months and I lacked the energy to do it any earlier because it seemed to be the thing that helped!

We just did cold turkey - a couple of days of crying, a few weeks of asking for it at every nap & bedtime but no real problems. It's just better to get it over and done with I think. We brought some for baby DD and DS wasn't bothered about them at all.

Do it, we're 3 weeks in from removing it from our nearly 3 year old and it's been awful, we left it way too long.

My daughter started biting through them at around 18 months so they had to go straight away. We threw them in the bin and she never asked for them. It was a lot easier than we thought it was going to be, but she does have a muslin cloth that she sucks so it made the transition easier.

I would just go cold turkey. You may be pleasantly surprised how well he takes it.