SteelyKid has used a pacifier from very shortly after she was born. We've been slowly working her off it-- she's stopped taking it to day care, or using it other than at bedtime or in the car-- but she's resisted giving it up entirely.
since she's now a great big three-year old, we decided it was time to ditch the pacifier completely. For help in this, we turned to her favorite tv show: MythBusters:
In that clip, Adam and Jamie investigate how difficult it is to take candy from a baby. This, predictably enough, results in a bunch of unhappy babies. SteelyKid has watched this clip a lot, so we suggested a while back that when she was ready to give up the pacifier, we would mail them to the MythBusters to give to the babies who had their candy taken away.
So, this morning, we dropped all of her pacifiers into a Priority Mail envelope, and stuck it in the mailbox, along with a letter(*). She took it pretty well this morning, but the real test will be tonight at bedtime when she doesn't get the pacifier as expected...
(*- After she left, I took the big envelope back out of the mailbox, because, really, we don't think Adam and Jamie need any more weird stuff in the mail than they already get. We did send the letter, though, on the off chance that anyone there will get it and be amused.)
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Technically I offered her a couple different options, including giving them to the babies in the infant room at daycare, and she chose the Mythbusters babies out of those.
Good luck! I think we got our daughter to give up the pacifier completely at 3, but it helped that she had settled on a stuffed Piglet as a nighttime companion. In fact, that stuffed Piglet is still her nighttime companion 13 years later!
When I was of pre-school age, if a kid was slow to give up thumb-sucking, your mom could... in my case, did... go to the pharmacy and purchase a sort of doctor-approved kiddie Tabasco sauce meant to be painted on the thumb, so the toddler would get an unpleasant hot mouth to suppress the behavior.
Is that stuff still available, or has it gone the way of other quaint medical/cultural practices like therapeutic bleeding, trepanation, and ritual scarification?
Emory, I have no idea; her three-year checkup isn't until Friday, and whether or not she hates our guts for this, the pacifiers are now all gone and aren't coming back, so I can't see a circumstance in which we'd need to ask.
(I can't imagine bitter-tasting sauces would be very effective on a pacifier made of silicone either.)
My 2.5-year-old sounds very similar, so I do hope you'll give an update about how the first night without the pacy goes!
I'm disappointed you didn't send the pacifiers.
1) The odds of a reply to the letter would go WAY up.
2) The odds that they might come up with a use for them on a future program are now zero. "From our box of Steelykid pacifiers ..."
Oh god, I'm so envious! I was never allowed a dummy (my mother disapproves of them on some sort of moral/puritanical grounds1), so I used to suck my finger, until it was a bloody mess of open sores. Even then, I still needed the comfort of mouthing something more than the chapped wounds gave discomfort. In the end, my mother sewed me into bandages, and then put rough-textured gloves (that'd hurt my mouth) over the top of them each night. I can still remember just how sore my hand got, and how this had to be repeated, on and off, over several years until I was school aged.
1 I think her argument was two-fold: one is the possibly reasonable point that it's hard to encourage a child to talk to you if it's sucking a dummy, although that isn't a counter-argument for allowing them at night or occasionally; the other, though, was purely that because it was an easy way to keep a child happy, it must somehow be cheating or bad parenting.
CCPhysicist, putting aside the whole "strangers sending things that are intended to be put into other children's _mouths_" issue, they don't actually have a public mailing address; we addressed the letter c/o the Discovery Channel.
stripey_cat, I did observe a _correlation_ between SteelyKid dropping her pacifier during the day and an increase in her talking. On the other hand, well, you pretty clearly know the other hand.
I gave my pacifier up in exchange for a " big boy bed". Of course I went to retrieve it from the trash bit magically it had already disappeared.
How'd the bedtime calamity go?
The Mythbusters headquarters is called like M5 Industries or something, and it's in south San Francisco. Wandered past it once, stopped, said, "This parking lot looks kinda familiar..." and there it was.
We never had pacifiers for our three kids. Now the grandkid has one and seems content. I will let you know what happens when it is time to get off the pacifier. Experimental data for future parents.
There are no children on Mythbusters. I'm imagining it being used by the crash test dummy, or seeing what happens if it is stuck in the barrel of a gun.