Mommies and Daddies don’t despair! Or Maybe still do, just a little lol.
On a serious note, don’t we all know of that one bad habit or attachment that we so desperately try to break our babies or toddlers away from?
- The thumb sucking saga
- The weaning off the breast
- Or the bottle
- The dummy attachment
While some people would say, let the child decide when they are ready to let go, there are others that argue the opposite, that there should be a time frame to put an end to these things. Then there are those that will say, don’t even venture into beginning such attachments, perhaps particularly the dummy.
My youngest daughter used a dummy, recommended to me by her paediatrician, as she was breastfeeding
every 25 minutes and I was slowly losing my cool. What she was really after was a comforting agent and it also helped when it came to pacifying her tears and calming her down for naps but more importantly allowing me to keep my sanity in check.
The problem arose when it was time to say bye-bye to her “dum-dum”. As expected, this task wasn’t going to be easy and it sure wasn’t! I tried everything to break that attachment even going so far as:
- “accidentally” running over it with my car while she watched from the window.
- having the dogs run away with it and use it as a chew toy.
- pretending to not be looking while the vacuum cleaner vacuumed it up.
- even packing it away in a special box so that the” Fairies” could come and take it to give to it another child who didn’t have a dummy.
As you might guess, NOTHING worked, for she would just look up at me with those bright blue eyes and sweetly say, “Now Mommy has to go shopping for more dummies again”!
I did, every single time. Then one day, I was forced to choose a dummy of a different colour. Most kids find a favourite dummy either by shape or colour. The trick is to buy 10 of these “favourites” at a time otherwise “Nou is jy in die kak!”. I was forced to buy another of the same shape but a different colour and when I arrived home, I found her waiting in anticipation with her arms on her hips as if to say – What took you so long! I presented her with her new dummy and wasn’t expecting what came next because if I had, I would have tried this ages ago. She proceeded to throw a tantrum and before I knew it, she had walked up to the dustbin and threw it in with greater force than Thor with his hammer.
And folks, that was that. She never asked again for her dummy. Hallelujah to that! If only everything else from here on goes that smoothly.
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