How to breastfeed and use a pacifier

5 tips on how to avoid nipple confusion, delayed speech, and misaligned teeth.

When I had my daughter, I had no idea the pacifier was so taboo or even a debate. The labor and delivery nurses at the hospital were my first experience with the anti pacifier mind set. Trying to be helpful and just doing their job, one nurse after another gave me the nipple confusion speech.

As a parent, my goal is to take as much parenting advice and tips from the people around me. If the information makes sense, I use it and if not, I ignore it.

My mom gave me some simple advice with the pacifier. "You can take away a pacifier, but you can't take away a thumb." That stuck with me.

Besides the little comments towards my daughter like, "you're too old to have a pacifier" or "take that ugly thing out of your mouth". I think most people were trying to help.

I do think pacifiers can have some negative effects, but I found a way to use a pacifier and over come those issues, so I shared them below.

1. How to avoid nipple confusion

Only offer a pacifier after a few well established breast feeding sessions. For my daughter, that was 4 feedings, then I'd only offer

her the pacifier when I wanted extra sleep or needed to accomplish something, like taking a shower or taking a short nap.

2. Avoiding tooth misalignment

Buying pacifiers that are dentist recommend is a good start for healthy teeth. Also, setting boundaries of when a child is allowed to use a pacifier is an option. Some parents have been successful only allowing pacifiers during nap time and when they need extra comfort.

3. Avoid speech delays and speech impediments

When your child is learning to talk, avoid letting your kid communicate with a pacifier in their mouth. My daughter learned quickly to remove her pacifier when she wanted to talk. Be consistent and follow through with this rule and your child will automatically take it out to talk.

4. The myth of the non self soothing baby and pacifiers.

I've been around a lot of different babies and children, some who took pacifiers and some who did not. Most of them go through a clingy, unable to soothe themselves phase and that's usually around 2. The pacifier does not cause a child to not be able to self soothe, it only gives the parent a tool to help that difficult stage.

5. Weaning from a pacifier

I honestly don't have any solid tips for weaning, I'm not against other parents weaning their children, but for me and my daughter I believe in self weaning.

That's not always possible and things happen though.

Like when my daughter started to bite holes and rip off the nipples of her pacifiers, that seemed dangerous to me. She had a pretty big collection of pacifiers and I wanted to wean as gently as possible. So I got to her level and let her know, if she bit or broke the nipples of her pacifier, I would have to throw it away and wouldn't buy anymore. The biting continued and one by one, the pacifiers were thrown away.

It was that simple. My daughter had one pacifier in her mouth and one in each hand and after following the steps above, she never cared about the pacifier again.