Our daughter’s first attempt at a “word” was not mama or dada, rather it was “baba” her name for her beloved pacifier. In retrospect, this probably should have been a sign of the level of attachment she would develop. Many experts recommend weaning your baby off a pacifier at around 12 months old, and you could say that we showed up pretty late to the game.
We embarked on losing the pacifier at around two years old and now, at almost three and half, we have finally broken up with said “ba ba.” It’s been a long road, with no shortage of strategies employed.
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Finally, at the dentist’s insistence that our daughter’s tooth alignment was in jeopardy, we took the plunge and said goodbye for good. Hopefully, other parents can learn from our mistakes and the insight that we gained in the process.
We initially took a slow approach and weaned our paci-dependent daughter off her crutch one step at a time. She wasn’t thrilled, but eventually we only allowed her to use her paci for sleep during naps and overnight. As she dropped her nap, sooner than we would have cared for, she only had the pacifier at bedtime. We knew kicking the nighttime paci would be the hardest to accomplish and girded ourselves for the battle to come.
We surveyed friends and family, and researched the best way to go about ditching the paci, and received no shortage of advice. One aunt advised that we cut off the ends of the pacifier and tell her it was broken. That might have been fine if our daughter wasn’t well aware that we owned a stockpile of other perfectly functioning ones.
In a similar fashion, a website advised poking a hole in the pacifier so that it wouldn’t function effectively. Not helpful as my daughter had already chewed holes in the majority of her pacifiers, and wasn’t put off by them in the least.
My husband read an adorable suggestion to bring your child to a Build-a-Bear workshop and put their pacifier inside a teddy bear so that they could continue to sleep with it, albeit in an entirely different form. I’m fairly certain that my daughter would have clawed the teddy bear open and relieved it of its stuffing rather than be separated from her true security object.
There were a few methods that we never attempted.
Frida Baby brand has capitalized on the problem by marketing a pacifier weaning set that includes five pacifiers which get progressively shorter with each step. The product was recommended for babies from 6-18 months, and we were clearly long past that point.
A friend said she had simply white knuckled it and gone cold turkey, but I was seriously dubious about how many nights I’d be willing to forgo sleep before caving in. A mom I know tried the slower, albeit gentler, method of removing her child’s pacifier from their mouth once they had fallen asleep each night, and moving it to the other side of the crib with the goal of breaking their dependence.
Another friend said that her husband took their daughter to a toy store to pick out a new comfort object to sleep with, and “accidentally” left the pacifier behind at the store.
In a similar fashion, a friend accidentally (legitimately this time,) left all of their pacis at her sister’s house when they traveled out of town.
On the opposite end, a friend sent their kiddo to stay with their grandparents for a week without any pacifiers. They came back broken from the habit. A brilliant way to outsource the task, but those poor grandparents.
There were many great suggestions, but I began to worry that at age three and a half, my daughter has simply grown too smart to be outwitted by our strategies. We tried to attach giving up the pacifier to the impending arrival of her new baby brother. After all, BIG siblings don’t need a pacifier, they’re for babies. When this refrain didn’t have the desired effect, we began to wonder whether she might just regress and steal her baby sibling’s pacifier when she saw him using one. The last thing we needed was the seeds of sibling rivalry sown early by paci envy and theft.
Several children’s books were recommended to us in preparation for the big separation, a few of which we tried. Among them were “Pacifiers Aren’t Forever” by Elizabeth Verdick, and "Binky” by Leslie Patricelli. The second of which deals with the emotions of losing your pacifier. Finally, our golden ticket was the book “The Paci Fairy,” and we settled on the book’s prescribed route to extinction. The premise of the book is that all the adults of a town use pacifiers, rendering them unable to speak and leaving no pacifiers left for the babies who need them. A local girl seeking to save her town meets and trains under the Paci Fairy, who helps her to take all the pacifiers from the grownups and give them to the babies thereby saving the town.
The Paci Fairy method prescribes reading the book several times, followed by a countdown on the calendar to the day the Paci Fairy will visit. On the prescribed day the pacifiers are collected and put out for the fairy to take and leave with a surprise in their place. Nothing wrong with some good old fashioned bribery. As such, the Paci Fairy amounts to a variation of the tooth fairy.
We dutifully read the book each night, although we found it much too long and advanced for a three year old, much less a one year old. As such, we took the parental prerogative to abbreviate the story and change up the wording as we saw fit.
As the day of the Paci Fairy’s visit approached we bought a suitably extravagant reward we deemed worthy of the sacrifice, in our case a Barbie Jeep. When the big night arrived we made a production of having our daughter decorate a special bag and very ceremoniously place every pacifier inside, lest she suspect any had been left behind. She put the pacifiers outside our front door, so we could avoid the creepy factor of a strange celestial being breaking into her room at night, and crossed our fingers as we took her up to bed. What followed went somewhat better than we expected. Our daughter requested the customary comfort of her favorite nighttime companion of course, but only needed a few reminders that we had put them all outside for the Paci Fairy. The bribe of a coming prize helped, and the anticipated tantrum was miraculously avoided.
We surreptitiously replaced the bag of pacifiers with the requisite toy, and hunkered down for what we feared might be a long night. Indeed our daughter did come to our room requesting her pacifier, but begrudgingly accepted the reminder that they were gone and was tucked back into bed without further incident. Cue the exhale of relief.
Our daughter was delighted by her new toy in the morning, but we knew this wouldn’t be the end of it. Every night necessitated the reminder that the pacifiers were all gone and had been given to other babies. Fortunately, our new baby was not one of them, or he would have been unceremoniously relieved of it. We listed off the names of other babies that we knew who would now have a pacifier thanks to our daughter’s generosity. This worked for awhile until my daughter decided to employ subterfuge by pitting me against my husband. On my nights to put her to bed, my daughter began to earnestly insist that my husband gave her pacifiers to go to sleep when he put her to bed. I fumed. How could he? After all our efforts, and secretly nonetheless. I felt betrayed. Should I have trusted the word of a three year old? Probably not in retrospect, but she was just so dang insistent. I accused my husband of the deception and was relieved, although a bit embarrassed, when he informed me that our daughter was manipulating me. We renewed our pact of solidarity in all things pacifier concerned and soldiered on.
Four months and an eternity later we have broken free of the pacifier’s tyranny. Although we still get the occasional half-hearted request for one, we are no longer subject to our three year olds' manipulations. It was a long road, and we are VERY thankful that our son has never picked up the habit.