The dreaded dummy!

[Bearcubmumma]

Morning all, just a quickie, ds has a dummy and has since newborn, now 4months, he loves it! And I do not mind at all, in my head I was thinking I'll tackle it when he is older (when Santa needs to give it to another little boy hehe) however I did not think about night times! When he is in a deep sleep dummy drops out and he is fine for a couple of hours, then from say midnight every hour or so I need to put that blady dummy back in!!
Shall I persevere because he will be old enough in the not so distant future to find it himself and put back in or shall I try and get rid?

At 7 months my little girl can put her own dummy back in but doesn't! We are still having to go in a couple of times a night to put the wretched thing back in but she refuses to sleep without it. I could cheerfully burn it, I hate it. If you can wean him off it I would say do it.

I got rid of the dummy a month ago - went cold turkey, he was 6 months. Havent looked back, he has slept 7-6:30 ish since

Light sleeping is a completely separate issue to using a dummy to get to sleep. You are blurring the symptom and the cause here.

Dummies are brilliant for allowing a baby to get to sleep. People use other things instead of a dummy - feeding to sleep, movement (like rocking) to sleep, patting to sleep and so on - but dummies are fantastic for allowing baby to get to sleep independently.

It is perfectly normal that the dummy comes out of the babies mouth when in a deep sleep because at that point the muscles around the mouth relax. That is usually around 10 minutes after going to sleep, up to about half an hour.

Once in a deep sleep the dummy is no longer needed. But if baby does wake up in the night the dummy re-insertion is the quickest and easiest way to get baby back to sleep without much fuss or bother.

As baby gets older, it is not about them being able to put dummy in by themselves (although they usually can by 9-12 months old). It is the fact that once older baby should be sleeping deeper because the usual causes of night wakes (most notably hunger) are gone, so baby sleeps through (ie doesn't wake up at all).

The fact that your baby is waking in the night is not caused by the dummy. It is caused by whatever is causing light sleep. The dummy is the thing that gets baby back to sleep. Not sure why you seek to remove that? Baby will be sleeping through soon anyway and so you won't need to re-insert dummy.

Agree with everything FATE said don't take away that 1 thing that settles him back off easily. Yes a quick get up to re insert is annoying but much preferable than him being awake crying not being able to drop back off to sleep. Dummies are amazing inventions I can't understand why some people are so against them.

I am not against them, I love that he has something that soothes him, it isnt just a couple get ups in the night to reinsert, it is every half an hour, my question was if we got rid of the dummy would his wake ups lessen eventually? Which would actually benefit him to sleep better, surely?
I can assure you he is not waking because of hunger, he refuses a bottle when I try.

It's worth a try to go without you've got it as back up if it all goes pear shaped

Agree with Fate, sounds like your dc is going through some sort of growthspurt , check out the wonder weeks. That site got me through many a sleepless night !