Hi, I’m Dana, Creator of the Sleep Sense Program. Here’s a question I get asked a lot, how do and when should I get rid of a pacifier?

Now, this one is a little bit tricky to answer and the reason is the American Academy of Pediatricians have in their recommendations that pacifier use could potentially reduce the risk of SIDS in the first six to 12 months of life. And so it’s difficult for me to give any kind of advice that goes against that. And so what I’m about to say today will depend on your decisions.

Ultimately, you are the parent, you are the boss, you call the shots. If you feel safer hanging onto that pacifier till the 12th month, then you should do that. But here is the crux of the issue, if your baby is pacifier dependent, meaning that that is their primary sleep prop, they use that pacifier 90%, 99% of the time to get themselves into sleep, we have to think of sleep like a journey. If you’re over here and you’re awake and over here is asleep, how we get from point A to B is the journey into sleep. And so what happens when a baby uses a pacifier to make that journey, inevitably, this pacifier is going to fall out, usually once a baby reaches stage three sleep, nothing is staying in anyone’s mouth at that point so it’s gonna fall out. They’re going to have a naturally occurring wake up somewhere in the night, that’s normal and expected.

But the problem will be with the getting back to sleep part. I’m awake, my favorite way to sleep is to suck something until I fall asleep, could somebody please come in and return my pacifier? And even if you load the crib with 10 pacifiers, the chances of a baby in the dark when they’re fatigued finding a pacifier and getting it back into their mouth is pretty low. So therein lies the problem. Now we have a prop dependency on the pacifier, which means, they’re not gonna sleep all the way through the night. They potentially are not going to take very long naps either, because once the baby gets to the end of a sleep cycle, which is about 40 to 45 minutes, they’re going to have a little wake up, a brief awakening. Hopefully they slide right back into another cycle, but if they are pacifier dependent they will most likely wake up at this point and start crying for you to come in.

Sometimes putting the pacifier back in will help them get back to sleep, and other times, too much time has passed, now they’re awake, they’re not as fatigued ’cause they had some sort of sleep and it just causes a bit of a nap disaster. So that’s the problem with the pacifier. And here’s where it gets even trickier in my opinion is when, now let’s say we’re past the 12 month mark. We are in the clear, we can get rid of that pacifier now. Most parents are very resistant to doing this because their child loves this pacifier. And who wouldn’t? Right? This is your favorite special way to get yourself to sleep. Nobody would happily give up their sleep prop. They just wouldn’t. And so now, we see children into the twos, threes, fours, fives, I’ve even had clients with children into the sixth and seventh still using a pacifier, because there never really becomes a great time to take something away in regard to sleep.

But what happens? Even if your child can find their own pacifier in the night it is a fragmentation of the night. Childhood is the one time in our lives when sleep is perfect, it is glorious, it is perfect, there’s no issues. That’s why kids have so much dang energy ’cause their sleep is so perfect. And so if we have a toddler with a pacifier dependency, instead of just breezing through every little wake up in the night and getting right back into another sleep cycle, they are fragmenting their sleep with a full wake up. Because I have to fully wake up to look around and try to find this pacifier and get it back into my mouth. So even if they’re not bothering you, it still bothers me that your child is having fragmented sleep when they shouldn’t be, when their sleep should be, let’s let it be perfect, okay? So if we’re talking about children over the age of 12 months, I’m gonna encourage you with all of my heart to get rid of the pacifiers. And you can just throw them all away, they’re just no longer here.

The good news is that kids are pretty like… First of all, they’re very adaptable and they have a short attention span. So they might ask for their pacifier periodically. You don’t have it, you don’t know where they are. Mm, they’re a bit upset but it passes quickly. And as the day’s go on, I mean, this is usually a non-issue. It feels like it’s gonna be a big issue, but it’s actually not a very big issue when you actually do it. If you wanted to hang on to one just for car rides or in the grocery store, I can live with that as long as it’s not involved in sleep. If we’re talking about a baby younger than 12 months, then, again, the choice is yours, the decision is yours. I am not telling you what to do with this pacifier issue. It has to be a decision you’re making independently. I’m just giving you the pros and the cons. The pros of keeping the pacifier and the cons of it. The cons of it might mean that you’re gonna have to go in periodically to wake up, or sorry, not to wake up the baby but to put that pacifier back in the baby’s mouth.

So you have to make a decision on risk reward, like what is the common bottom line goal here? Do we want everyone sleeping better? Are you ready to leap off the sidewalk curb because you can’t sleep at night? I don’t know. So you’ll have to make that decision on your own. But again, there’s no real easy way to wean off of a pacifier, it just has to go.

All right, thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.