I have gone through kicking the thumb-sucking habit with two of my three kids, and had a wildly different experience with each child. The first was clean and easy, the second we had a few false starts, but we finally broke through.
The main thing I learned is that it only works if your child is a willing participant. If they are not on board, then just stop the process, because everyone involved will get very frustrated (mostly me).
It takes 21 days to break a habit, or create a new one. Twenty-one days is all it takes to break a child of a thumb-sucking habit, said my pediatric dentist.
Twenty-one days of constant reminders and sticker charts and rewards. Suddenly, 21 days was starting to sound like 21 months. It is probably just me, but I am the worst at trying to keep track of the sticker chart reward system. I tried to use it for potty training and I was so inconsistent with it that I ended up just giving my kid the sheet of stickers, which of course ended up getting put on the toilet.
As I was putting my son to sleep on our attempted first of 21 nights of kicking the thumb-sucking habit, he was trying really hard not to suck his thumb. I started to wonder, do you have to start the week over if he sucks his thumb on the 6th night? Or the month over if it is on the 19th night? That seems a little unfair.
As he lay wide awake almost an hour past his regular bedtime, and my concern shifted from thumb-sucking to how tired he was going to be at school the next day, I caved and said, “You know what buddy, you did a great job, I’m proud of you for lasting this long, but you really need to sleep. So how about we restart this on Friday night when you don’t have to get up for school the next day.” With that he resumed his thumb-sucking and was asleep in less than a minute. So alas, my track record of success with sticker charts was right on course.
But lo and behold, the 21-day program worked! It is broken up into manageable bits of time—daily stickers, 1 reward at the end of each completed week of stickers for 3 weeks (4 if you want to make it "rock solid," as my husband would say). For the last week, the dentist recommended having something that would get them really excited, like picking out their own toy. So my son picked out his toy before we started, and I put a photo of it on his chart so he knew what he was working toward. At the end of the 4 weeks, we went back to the store and purchased it.
Reward ideas:
The final hurrah was a trip back to the dentist for a special photo that goes up on their wall. Which I think seals the deal.
My second child was NOT on board when we started trying to get her to stop sucking her thumb, and that was my biggest mistake. Not only was it frustrating for me, but it probably wasn’t much fun for her either.
I first started with the sticker chart, and she may as well have laughed in my face. She didn’t find stickers rewarding and didn’t get the connection between not sucking her thumb and getting a sticker thus resulting in a reward. We tried splitting it into AM and PM stickers for quicker feedback, but that didn’t work either. She has always had a sweet tooth, so I tried a gumball dispenser with M&Ms—that failed, too.
My Special Shirt
I found these pajama shirts online that have mittens sewn into them to help kids stop thumb-sucking. They were great shirts—I bought two of them thinking it was genius. When I went into her room the first night, she was topless sucking her thumb. If your kid is old enough and wants to suck his/her thumb, they are easy enough to just take off. Again, this would have been great if she had been on board. The company is called My Special Shirt, if you are interested.
Dentist Visit
My daughter LOVES our dentist, which really helped us with this, I think. Our dentist did a great job of gearing her up and getting her to buy into the process. If you are stuck, it might be worth having a side conversation with your child’s dentist to see if they can help sell them on the idea.
Sticker Chart
After my daughter was on board, post-dentist pep talk, we revisited the sticker chart. She decided that a Snow White dress was an appropriate final reward, and since we’d been at this for over 3 months already, I decided that yes, whatever will motivate her to stop is worth it for me.
At the end of the process, her sticker chart was 7 weeks long—we kept adding weeks, as it was a much tougher habit for her to break than it was for my son. To her credit, she really was trying, but I couldn’t get her the Snow White dress until the habit was definitely broken. About 5 weeks into it, she was on a good streak but was really struggling with not doing it at night when she was going to sleep. It was about that time when we happened to be back at the dentist.
Mavala
I told the dentist what a great job she was doing, but that we were just having a bit of trouble at night. She handed us a bottle of Mavala (you can find it on Amazon), which is a terrible tasting nail polish to paint on her thumbnail. It worked like a charm. She would remind us to put it on her at night, and it was that little extra thing she needed to get through her final two weeks, which gave us a three-week streak and finally ended her thumb-sucking. I think she ended up using the nail polish for a few weeks after that, just because it made it easier for her and she knew it worked.
The dentist’s motivation for getting them to stop was based on her seeing their teeth move. I never sucked my thumb and I still had braces, so I was less concerned about that and more concerned about how sick they were both getting all the time from all the germs they were picking up in school and then putting in their mouths.
It was a challenging few months, but in the end it was worth the energy.
Were any of your kids dependent on a pacifier or their thumb? What worked for you to break the habit?
If your kids are sitting like this, you need to make them stop. Now.
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