**This post was most recently updated in April 2024 after being lost to a virus in 2022**
I’ll never forget the first time Augustine sucked her thumb. We were sitting on a couch – well, I was sitting on the couch and she was laying in my arms….but I should back up….
I wasn’t a thumb sucker – I was a finger sucker.
I sucked my two fingers – the ring and middle fingers to be exact. So I would have doomed me to a heavily orthodontic future, had I not already been on my way there. See, I was genetically predisposed to bad teeth.
Even my wife will make fun of my teeth, so, yeah, I feel comfortable describing my mouth as ‘motley’.
If the United Nations were a mouth – it would be mine. There are big teeth, small teeth, under developed teeth, stained teeth & one very much too white capped tooth. The whole apparatus is too large in scope for the space it was given to inhabit. (basically what works for Hillary Swank doesn’t work for me or my face)
So…I was destined for braces and the finger sucking made it worse (this is according to an orthodontist that I only really remember as being and appearing ‘tired’).
Now, I don’t want to say that my braces’ experience was necessarily worse than the average persons, but, when all was all said and done, I ended up leaving about six teeth and a few pints of blood behind in the spit sink.
(I have since had my procedure described to me by today’s modern dentists as extreme and barbaric. So, I didn’t have it the worst but defiantly not the best either.)
Maybe knowing how bad my experience was will help to explain why I’m choosing this hill to die on…
….After going through it all – I just knew ‘there had to be a better way’, and (window into my soul) the easiest solution has always been to go back in time and stop it from happening. Yes, I would daydream of myself flying back to baby-crib-me and pulling my fingers out of my baby-mouth, repeatedly.
Cut To Where We Began : Me sitting on the couch in our A/C-less LA duplex, watching as Augustine’s thumb slowly waggled its way towards her gaping toothless mouth for the first time – just as she drifts off to sleep for her 11:30am nap.
Back then, at 0 years old, hitting thumb-action was a milestone for us as parents and as a family. I remember bragging to other parents later that week that ‘Augustine had finally started sucking her thumb’. Underneath all of this though was my 15 year-old self saying, “You’re back in the time!!! You can stop this!!!”
I, of course, ignored this. Thinking, of course, “I had everything under control”.
I had a plan. I figured we (me and baby A) could roll with the thumb for a year or two. (After all, she didn’t even have teeth yet.) Then, we could work really hard to break the habit when she was still so young that it really couldn’t be called a habit. It was so simple.
And…it worked.
It did. No joke. It happened a bit later, somewhere around the late 3’s, but it only took about a week of passive reminding and bad-tasting-thumb-stuff and thumb sucking was gone.
But…then the pandemic…the world falling apart…and the thumb came back. Somewhere my Marty McFly disappeared before reaching the end of “Johnny B Good”.
At first I didn’t care. I know thumb sucking is a comfort/coping mechanism, and there was so much going on – I wasn’t about to stamp out any way that could make my daughter feel better/safer/comfortable. After all, it was only going to be 2 week/a month/a bit longer…it could be over any day.
Time dragged on, the unusual became normal…so did the thumb, and now – I’m the most annoying person in any car, restaurant, and/or family room.
“No thumb, no ear.”
I’m so sick of hearing myself say it. Sometimes I open my mouth and the will to just not say that again silences my voice – leaving me to let out a big open mouth *sigh*.
It’s worth mentioning that I’m completely alone on this crusade. Jade, the grandparents, her friends, it’s more than they just don’t care – they actively disagree with the importance of stopping the thumb sucking. My wife will shut me down even as she talks about how bad her experience was with braces.
So, on a fundamental level, I have been forced to ask and re-ask myself – what is the deal with thumb sucking? Is it my own pure vanity to stop my daughter from turning the digit of her choice into a raisin?
Really, if something feels so good – can it be wrong?
I want to turn to the experts, but the experts disagree – and have disagreed openly throughout my time as a parent.
Essentially there are two camps, dentists and pediatricians, and their division really makes me think that they are the two classes of doctor that are most likely to face off in hand-to-hand combat.
- Pediatricians : Thumb sucking is natural. If I want to stop Auggie from sucking her thumb, I might as well feed her unlimited screen time, force her to identify with gendered colors, and refuse to help with her homework.**
- Dentists : Thumb sucking is a blight on humanity. Letting your kid suck their thumb is tantamount to being an absent father. I’d only have myself to blame when Augustine drops out of middle school with her second kid and dies of smokers lung at 32 in the parking lot of a CVS.
- **I do want to mention that the 2 pediatricians I’ve asked about thumb sucking both said “it’ll disappear naturally, usually their peers will embarrass it out of them” (which sounds like bonkers doctoring).
So, I’d turn to other parents, but it turns out other parents don’t like to touch this topic.
In fact, the only people who freely offer their advice are our friends without kids; which is awesome, and super helpful given that their beliefs have absolutely no repercussions towards them, life is a party, yolo and let’s all do brunch.
With no guide or map, I have to rely only on my own gut instinct – which, even at the worst times, even when I’m sick of saying it, even when it’s going to lead to a fight, says “no thumb is worth the agony if it avoids braces”.
To everyone who wants me to stop telling Augustine to pull her thumb out of her mouth, you have forgotten the pain, embarrassment, and annoyance of braces. I’m just doing my best as a Dad to steer my daughter away from that pit of despair – the hours spent in the school bathroom picking bread from between metal wires, the sleepless nights after the bands were just tightened, the bored drone of an orthodontist telling you ‘some of these teeth have to come out’ and the weird late nights in your 30s when you stare at your mouth in the mirror and wonder why is looks so small now.
So, even though apparently thumb sucking is fine and natural, and braces are an unavoidable part of life – to some people, I stand apart. I keep at my one man fight – even if it will only ever be me, fighting this all alone – even if there will never be a thank you even if I succeed – even if I alienate my family, in-laws, and pediatricians everywhere. I will keep at it. I will succeed.
I will do it because I think its the right thing to do and that is my path…
Dads-Log Day 1354 :: We are still stuck in the kid nebula. Thumb nail worn to a nub, digits soaking wet. But there might be an end in sight. When I fired a “No Thumb” today – it was met without the dying howl of a banshee…maybe this is a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe there is hope.
**2024 Update**
So, she stopped.
It was nothing I did and nothing that I helped end. All that repeated ‘no thumb’ was fruitless.
Instead, she went to the dentist. This was the first dentist that spoke directly to her like a person/patient (this dentist is awesome and we still fly across the country to go to her.)
There’s no ‘essentially’ or ‘basically’ to this story. The dentist told Augustine that she needed to stop thumb sucking. Augustine walked out of the office and hasn’t put her thumb in her mouth sense.
It’s crazy making that it ended up being a split-second change after hours of me repeating the same dumb command.
As for the braces, the 6 years of thumb sucking hasn’t definitely lead to braces…which is crazy. At our last appointment, while many of her piers are getting braces, our dentist told Augustine that we needed to hold off and might not need them.
Meanwhile, Atlas has never sucked anything….so he’s the real test cast as to whether it’s genetics or action that get us Christian’s to have braces.