If you’d rather read than watch, here’s a transcription of the video…

This week’s question comes from Morgan. She writes:

“I have a one year old daughter who is off the bottle and puts herself to sleep in her own crib at night. I’m just wondering the best way to take a pacifier away. She wakes frequently in the middle of the night looking for it and if she can’t find it she cries.”

This is a great question Morgan, and if you’ve watched any of my videos prior to this, you know that I have some pretty strong feelings around pacifiers. I do think that they are very disruptive to the natural consolidation of nighttime sleep, and even if she was capable of finding the soother on her own in the night and getting it into her own mouth without interrupting you at all, it’s still very fragmenting to her sleep.

When we are children, that is the one time in our lives when our sleep is perfect and beautiful. So I always suggest let’s really try to preserve that for our children because it is so wonderful. Instead of just having little tiny wakeups in her night, now she’s having full arousals where she has to now find a pacifier and get it back into her mouth. So you can see how that’s very fragmenting and it’s not a good quality nighttime sleep that she should be having. So even if that wasn’t the problem it’s still a problem. But the fact that she’s waking you up, then that adds to the problem for sure.

So the good news here is that she’s off the bottle and she’s putting herself to sleep at night. My guess is that she uses the pacifier to put herself to sleep, and that’s very similar to a bottle. So my guess is that it was once the bottle she was using and now that’s transferred to the pacifier. The good news is that is that she was capable of transferring the skills from the bottle to the pacifier, so we know that she’s capable of transferring the skills from the pacifier to herself.

In my opinion there’s no easy way to wean a toddler off of a pacifier. If you do that it almost feels like a tease. You know, “I’ll let you have it for five minutes and then I’m going to take it away” or “I’m only going to let you have it intermittently throughout the day,” for special occasions, or whatever the case may be. It really keeps the addiction, so to speak, alive because you haven’t really taught this child how to cope without it. You’re just now putting all these restrictions on it.

So I would just say throw them all away. Get rid of them. Don’t have them in the house so you’re not tempted, and if she has some trouble with this it will only be for a few nights until she learns how to do this on her own without the pacifier. And if you want to try to ease some of the anxiety around it you could do the stay in the room method with her, where you sat for three days by the crib, three days in the middle of the room, three days by the door and out. But I don’t even think you need to go there in this case because she’s not used to having you there when she falls asleep. By the sounds of it, she’s putting herself to sleep without your help. So my worry would be if you backtrack then are you creating a new problem.

So my best advice would be to just leave and check on her. You know, you can go in every five minutes and tell her its okay and lay her back down and tuck her back in. Maybe you offer a new sleeping toy, like a dolly or a teddy that can now become the attachment object.

It’s always so difficult for parents to accept the fact that the pacifier needs to go. You know, if anything’s going to make a parent get all worried and anxious and fearful it is for some reason usually always about that pacifier. But I do find that the transition is relatively easy. It really only takes a night or two and if you just keep telling her that the pacifiers are gone, they’re all gone, they’re nowhere to be seen, then it fades. It fades very quickly and the new skill will emerge and the good news is that she won’t be waking in the middle of the night anymore because she won’t need to. If she has a wakeup, she knows how to get herself back to sleep without any kind of prop so she’ll become a very good nighttime sleeper and that is definitely the goal.

So thanks for your question and sleep well!