PEARL 28

Pacifiers

In our lives, we have seen many ideas come and go: constant cigarette

smoking in public places, collecting pet rocks, and the fad of birthing
children into a pan of warm water. What do all of these have in common?
Through the course of history, many normal human beings didn’t engage
in these behaviors. One might say that the behaviors simply aren’t
“normal” responses of the human race. Use of a pacifier in toddlerhood
falls into this category.
In the past, did children walk around with a nipple in their mouth? No
more than adults walked around with a lit weed and smoke coming out
their nose! During the early critical times of brain development, pacifiers
lock in neural connections that essentially tell a child, “Get frustrated, get
bored, get fussy — and handle it by putting something in your mouth.”
Throughout history, infants may have had a nipple in their mouth much
of the time. But toddlers? No. No mother of yore provided a nipple
manufactured or otherwise for her child to put in his mouth and walk
around. The child had to at least be creative enough to decide for himself
what he might want to suck on.
Pacifiers tend to be isolating in toddlerhood. Even the mothers who
earlier encouraged their children to suck on a pacifier have a bit of
uneasiness when their child walks around with a pacifier in his mouth.
And strangers — particularly men — almost never think a toddler
walking about with a pacifier is “cute.” In fact, such a child is approached
much less than a child who looks at a person and smiles without a
pacifier. Many adults immediately look another direction.