Two-Fingers

According to the American Dental Association, eighty-five to ninety-nine percent of children have finished sucking their thumb spontaneously by the age of four or five.  Babies and children use thumb-sucking as a method to put themselves back to sleep during the night, for comfort, or when tired or bored.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that fingers are attached to hands and hands cannot be thrown into a trashcan.  A tough habit to break.

We called Grant "two-fingers" for a long time.  From infancy, he sucked his two fingers on the left hand.  As a baby, it was so cute and practical.  No need to find the lost binky in the middle of the night.  No need to worry about a lost binky on a long car trip.  The benefits were great until it was discovered this habit could not be broken.  We tried wrapping the fingers with athletic tape (which was easily pulled off).  We tried putting Tabasco sauce on the fingers before bed (which was easily wiped off).  We even tried taping socks on his hands (easily pulled off).  How do you stop a habit that occurs at night when a child is asleep?  Teeth and jaw were affected.  It was also way past the age of spontaneous cessation.  The answer came from the orthodontist--an "apparatus" was required.  This did not sound good.

Jaws was James Bond's fictional assassin in the movies The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.  Grant, too, now had a mouth of steel and we called him Jaws.  The metal appliance was literally attached to the upper palate and had prongs that came down from the roof of the mouth so that fingers could not be inserted into the mouth.  Now chewing--that was another story.  It took quite a while to learn how to chew and not do damage to his tongue and mouth.  Ouch is all I can say.   It was very painful to watch in the beginning but the good news was it worked!  The bad news was it had to be in place six months to make sure the habit was broken because braces followed to repair the damage done.  Best advice?  Stick with a binky if at all possible.

Photo above of Grant aka two-fingers hanging out in the backyard.