Five and a half years ago

This girl started sucking her thumb.


I thought, at the time, that it was adorable. I had not had any thumb-suckers so far, and I thought that the idea of a baby soothing herself to sleep with her own thumb was sheer genius.

Well, like most thumb-suckers, it became apparent over time that the thumb-sucking had to stop. She had started doing it more often during the day, during awake-times. Any time her blanket was within reach, or if she was watching TV, or riding in the car, or otherwise not using her hands or mouth for something specific (like eating), her thumb knew right where to go.


By the time Zoe was 3, I started half-heartedly trying to get her to stop. During the ages of 3 and 4, I tried putting band-aids or tape on her thumbs at night, taking away her blanket, painting "Thum" on her nails (which doesn't do one bit of good), and pep-talking her. She was getting a pretty good overbite due to the thumb-sucking, but I secretly hoped the problem would just go away on its own and I admit that I wasn't ever very consistent in my stop-thumb-sucking attempts.

Well, last month 5 1/2-year-old Zoe lost her first tooth, which was the earliest of any of my kids. I told her that night, "Zoe, now you know that since your permanent teeth are coming in, it's really important that you stop sucking your thumb so that you don't ruin your new teeth." And what do you know, that did it! I bought Zoe three boxes of her own band-aids, the kind that "taste gross" according to her (Curad) and she kept them in her room. Every night, on her own, she would apply a band-aid to each thumb, and make a conscious effort to keep them away from her mouth. Amazingly, it worked! I helped her remember the first few nights but then she did it on her own. After a couple of weeks she announced to me one morning that she had not put band-aids on her thumbs the night before, but that she had not sucked them. I inspected her thumbs and sure enough, they did not have that tell-tale look of having been sucked in the night. Another week or so later, as an experiment, I was checking on her one night before I went to bed and she was sleeping, blissfully thumb-free, and I thought I'd try to trick her. I wondered how converted she was to non-thumb-sucking so I tried to stick her thumb in her mouth. Is that mean? Well she was fast asleep and she would NOT take it! Yay! Zoe is officially thumb-free! I'm so proud of her! And, I'm convinced that just like potty-training, it's much easier to get a child to do it when they're good and ready.