My son was three months old when I first noticed that he preferred his thumb to the pacifier. He was really comfortable with spitting out the pacifier at night and using his cute little thumb instead and I wasn’t about to be getting up every time that happened to remove his thumb and return the pacifier so thumb sucking would be his comfort for the next little while.
We made the decision that we wouldn’t make a big deal about it and tackle it later down the road when he was a bit older. When I say we didn’t make a big deal I mean we didn’t make him feel self conscious about it. We avoided comments like “Why are you sucking your thumb?” or “You are too old to be sucking your thumb” keeping in mind that for most children that would make them resist more and that is not an effective approach.
I’m not going to lie, I did worry about what it might do to his teeth and how the process of stopping this habit would go. I think that the biggest part of fear is the unknown. I had to remind myself to be positive and go with his cues and feelings and everything would work out.
Next we had to decide WHEN to tackle it. At what age do we start to work on stopping it. That truly depends on your family and your child. Remember that at different ages, they have different levels of understanding and you will want to tailor your approach to suit them and where they are at. I preferred to wait until a bit later because my son can understand everything. It is a habit and will be a challenge for him to overcome, but the strategy I will talk about as to how I did it is best for a child between ages 3 and up depending on their understanding. (For a 3 year old, you might need to modify things a tiny bit.)
STEP ONE | Start Setting Limits
Work on thumb sucking only for sleeping. (Loosely. Don’t stress too much.) You want it to be more like redirecting and keeping occupied rather than a constant stress/battle.
For us that was around 18 months old when it was a bit easier for him to understand the boundary being set. I would encourage thumb sucking only for nap time or night time. If he was sucking his thumb during waking hours I would gently remind him that thumb sucking is just for sleeping and redirect him with an activity or task that would engage him in something different so that he didn’t even feel like he needed to suck his thumb.
Keep in mind kids go through phases and regressions. There were times when my son would fall back into sucking his thumb more and during those times I would ramp up the gentle reminders and redirects and adjust to the phase keeping in mind that my strong willed child would go against what I was asking if it was asked too often. Find the balance.
STEP TWO | Pick A Day To Stop
Picking a day to stop is important for a couple of reasons. First, if you don’t pick a specific day and set it in stone you will never be able to follow through consistently and will keep pushing it off. Secondly, having a date set can also help your child understand and see what to expect. Sit down together to pick the day and have them help you mark the calendar.
Don’t pick a date too far in the future. Waiting a month can cause anticipation and anxiety to build up in your child and you don’t want that. We also want to avoid them sucking their thumb even more than usual to get in all the thumb sucking they can before it stops. My son and I sat down and picked the date, we circled it on the calendar and off we went!
STEP THREE | Have A Plan
Have a plan. Know what you are going to do and discuss it with your child when the time comes. Not at bedtime the night of, but before and during the day, you can talk about what will happen at bedtime that night and what you will be doing.
Know what to do for each step. Writing it out helps! Or you can contact us and we can absolutely help you with your plan of action!
For us that plan was a reward that he chose. I had him pick what his reward would be from a list of pre-approved toys. He chose a LEGO set. I picked it up and put it in the garage, in a place he could see it but couldn’t touch it. It was a great motivator for him. When he would spot it and ask about it, we would go over the agreement – “Remember that if you go 7 days without sucking your thumb you get that special surprise!”
Setting The Plan In Motion
The plan was set and we were ready so I set up a chart and showed him what he would need to do. The plan was for him to go 7 nights without his thumb and he would get his Lego. He would get a sticker on his chart each morning. 7 nights for some children can be long so I also added a few extra treats for certain milestone dates. For example after 3 nights, he got a McDonald’s Ice cream treat. Younger children may need more immediate items.
Because sucking his thumb was something he was so used to, I knew that he would suck it in his sleep without even knowing and I wanted to set him up for success. I was going to need to put something on his thumb to remind him not to suck it. Otherwise, he would just do it unknowingly.
I decided to put a tensor bandage on his thumb and since he is 5, breaking a limb and having a “cast” is all the hype these days. So I told him we would wrap his hand in a cast bandage for the first few nights. I made it into a fun thing. The key here is that I told him all of this during the day, before night so he had some time to prepare and I had some time to hype it up and make it fun.
We made sure to keep his Lego reward next to his bed as a strong visual motivator. He was reminded that when he woke up in the morning we would check the bandage and if it was undisturbed he got a sticker for not sucking his thumb throughout the night.
It was also important for us to be mindful of the fact that going to sleep without his thumb might be a bit challenging for the next few nights so my husband and I hashed out a plan on how to respond to him should he struggle. The plan was going to be to sit in the room with him until he fell asleep and be there to support his emotions and in case he tried to suck his thumb so that we could redirect him. I did have to go in a time or two to talk him through some big feelings he was having but that gave him the tools he needed to feel confident about stopping.
We are happy to report that he went 7 days without sucking his thumb to sleep and he couldn’t be more proud! He did four nights with the tensor bandage and then we downgraded to regular band-aids and we did so for about 2-3 weeks afterwards.
He is really really proud of himself and thanks us everyday for that Lego kit.
Conclusion:
That is our journey so far with thumb sucking. I am super proud of myself and my son. Our journey went a lot more smoothly than I anticipated and that’s because we had a solid plan of action. Sometimes that plan helps to take away a lot of stress. It made me feel super confident going into it because I felt like my plan was pretty solid and that really goes a long way because that is a big piece of the parenting puzzle – confidence. If we’re not going into something with confidence, it’s not going to go as well as we want it to go because our children are going to feel that lack of confidence from us. Our confidence fills them with confidence. Set yourselves up to win!
If you need any guidance on setting up a plan that works for you and your child, book a call with us and let’s get started. We love helping families tackle these types of parenting challenges and we can find a strategy that will work for you and your child!
Listen to our All Things Sleep & Parenting Podcast E.71 Conquering Thumb Sucking! 🎙
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