The pacifier may cause middle ear infections. Pacifiers may increase your baby’s risk for middle ear infections.Getting up every five minutes to stick the binky in the baby’s mouth just isn’t going to cut it. Not to mention, the pacifier is supposed to give you more sleep by giving the baby more sleep. That kind of defeats your purpose, since the idea of the pacifier is to help the baby be calm and sleep, and not for the pacifier to become something else that makes the baby cry (when he loses it). That means you may find yourself running to the baby in the middle of the night, every time he loses the pacifier, to put the durned thing back in the baby’s mouth. If your baby becomes used to sleeping with the pacifier, you may find he awakens every time the pacifier falls out of his mouth. A baby can become dependent on the pacifier.Anything that complicates breastfeeding in the first few weeks and months can make developing a steady milk supply difficult. Offering both before nursing is well-established can confuse a very sensitive baby and interfere with the baby’s nursing. The shape of a pacifier is different than the shape of the nipple. A pacifier can cause nipple confusion in the early days after birth.Probably both these ideas are true, making it easier to surrender the pacifier than the thumb. You can just throw it away and then it’s not always “there.” Others say that with thumb-sucking, there is sensation experienced in both thumb and mouth, making it a more difficult habit to break than the pacifier which gives sensation only in the mouth. Some say that it’s easier to stop sucking a pacifier because it’s not a part of the baby’s body, unlike the thumb. The pacifier habit is easier to break than the thumb habit.Research suggests that babies who use pacifiers when napping and sleeping have a lower risk for SIDS.
A pacifier may cut your baby’s risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).Sucking a pacifier can help prevent the ear pain associated with air travel. An adult can chew gum or hold his nose while swallowing, but a baby can’t do anything intentional to ease the ear pain that comes with pressure changes. A pacifier can keep the baby’s ears “open” while flying.Also, if the baby awakens, sometimes putting the pacifier in the baby’s mouth will help the baby fall back asleep. If you can slip the pacifier into the baby’s mouth, you may just be able to get that baby into bed without him waking up. Some babies fall asleep at the breast and as you try to ease them into their cribs, they awaken. A pacifier can help your baby fall asleep.Stick the pacifier in the baby’s mouth and voila! The baby has already forgotten all about the discomfort from the medical procedure and is quiet once more. The baby has just had a vaccine or a blood test and is crying. A pacifier can serve as a distraction.Yet they can’t be eating all the time! The pacifier offers extra sucking without causing infants to eat beyond what their immature little tummies can handle. Some babies are only happy when they are sucking. With that said, here is a list of pros and cons regarding today’s view of pacifiers: Pacifier Pros Listen to what your heart tells you and you won’t go wrong. My advice is to do what feels best to you as a mom. I spent some time researching current thought on pacifier use just now and saw that while some of the advice fits with my experience as laid out above, some of it definitely does not. I’d buy and sterilize a few pacifiers and stow them in a clean baggie in my hospital bag, giving it to the baby between feedings, and that worked very well for me. I also found you had to give the pacifier very early on, or the baby wouldn’t take to it. I learned with my first that you had to find a pacifier that was small enough that it wouldn’t set off the baby’s gag reflex. I searched in vain for such an occurrence. That several babies had arrived at the emergency room, dead on arrival, with pacifiers down their throats. All my babies adapted just fine to having both.įinally, I had a nursing expert insist to me that pacifiers were deadly. If I gave my baby a pacifier, this would make it difficult for the baby to nurse, since these were two differently shaped objects and the baby wouldn’t be able to adapt. Then there was the myth that pacifiers cause nipple confusion.
I’m fair-skinned, and cracked nipples due to nursing were unavoidable. Also I worked hard at positioning, and nothing I did ever made a difference.
But let me tell you, I nursed all 12 of my children, and nursing longer did upset their tummies. They would tell me that soreness came from poor positioning. The experts would tell me that longer suckling didn’t mean more milk, since most of the milk comes in the first several minutes of nursing and after that, it’s not a significant enough amount to be causing my baby gas.