ControverSunday: Pacification

Writing that round-up to prove I’d read everyone’s posts last week nearly killed me, so this week I’ll just say: HA! My favorite part of this round of contributions has been reading some of y’all’s own histories with comfort objects. I am laughing and crying. And feeling gritty asphalt under my toes as I watch the garbage truck turn the corner, bearing away my precious blanky.

Except that’s not my story; go to Our Lady of Perpetual Breadcrumbs by clicking the badge below, view the list of contributors linked up in her post and find the sad stories of parental deception and lost innocence. Or, rather, lost binkies.

 

So. The birthing center in the hospital where Henry was born is “baby friendly.” I’m not going to look up the mission statement for this, so I may be conflating some of their “baby friendly” practices with other general policies that relate more to labor and delivery than the actual baby, but some of the main features of this center were: all stages of delivery and subsequent stay happen in the same room, which is kept nice and dark and quiet during delivery, minimal equipment (when appropriate), rooming-in during the entire stay (ie: baby is not taken to a nursery), and breastfeeding is supported/stressed. This last bit meant the hospital accepted no sponsorship from formula companies, ie: no swag-bags of formula samples and bottles left strategically in the parents’ rooms. Formula was never offered nor suggested by nurses, and even when our pediatrician ordered supplementation to get Henry to poop on our second day, one of the center’s lactation consultants (who visited daily) muttered passive-aggressively about it, and nearly slapped the little 2-oz sample bottle out of my partner’s hands when she saw Henry guzzling it–claiming he needed an ounce, tops, to grease the wheels. (Oh, and Perpetua? She tried to sell us that “use a cup” line, too.) Another of the myriad ways that the center supported breastfeeding and was “baby friendly” through its policies was a NO PACIFIERS rule.

I’m sure if you brought your own in, they wouldn’t take it away. But I do think that the support staff would advise against it. Other posters have made passing mention of this in their posts–the basic line is that pacifiers can lead to nipple confusion or otherwise interfere with breastfeeding. I’m not so sure about nipple confusion, but I do agree that in the very early days? When you are trying to get your milk to come in and the baby gaining weight is very important, it makes sense to push for lots and lots of stimulation to the breast, rather than to the pacifier. The breast will produce in response to the frequency of suckling from the child, so this just makes sense.

It’s also not generalizable to all situations and kind of unfair.

Now, I loved our birthing center and do agree, for the most part, with their policies. Having that thorough amount of lactation support was AWESOME. Even including the consultant who made me feel conflicted and awful about giving Henry formula–we were given widely different advice on other things from the different nursing shifts, and though it was confusing and sometimes anxiety inducing, the variety of advice on swaddling, soothing, feeding and diapering was actually a better lesson for new parents than a unified front; otherwise you might not regard your baby as an individual and think you are just doing something “wrong” when a given approach doesn’t work for you. I’m sad that I no longer need to call the lactation support line, because those ladies were so nice. I also loved that they exclusively used cloth diapers, showing parents how to use them and thereby exposing more families to them as an option. It just made so much sense that a hospital, that uses a fuckload of diapers, would make this choice. So, so cool. And it wasn’t impossible for me to obtain some free samples of formula to take home when they were prescribed by our ped for helping with the pooping, so it’s not like anyone acted unreasonably intractable. I believe that early support is crucial for breastfeeding; I absolutely agree that throwing free formula at parents can undermine breastfeeding rates. BUT I also think that it is patronizing to assume that parents will “choose against” breastfeeding or that it will fail solely because they were given an Enfamil diaper bag.

Oh wait, I’m talking about formula again. Back on task: I think it’s silly to believe that breastfeeding is going to fail because of some savvy use of a pacifier, even in the early days. I mean, COME ON.

This is why our pediatrician’s attitude was charming: at our first appointment in her office (outside the grounds of the birthing center) she mentioned that Henry seemed to have a powerful need to suck, and asked if we were anti-binky. I like that she opened it up to us first, to get a sense of our opinions (and politics) right away. She might as well have said, “Do you read the Internet?” because, as another poster has mentioned, it is the main galvanizer on the issue. I said that we had “heard” (ie: the Internet had shouted at me) that pacifiers could interfere with establishing breastfeeding so we were cautious but interested. She said it was important to know the potential consequences of pacifier use early on, BUT she and her practice were “family friendly” (a joke on the birthing center’s “baby friendly”). Meaning, pacifiers can make a big difference for the poor parents trying to comfort a baby who just wants something to suck on every minute of the day, asleep or awake, which was Henry. She told stories of sneaking “contraband pacis” from the NICU (where the soothie pacifiers are invaluable to managing preemie pain) to the birthing center. She offered this bit of advice up: “If you are leaving an obviously hungry baby in its car seat in the corner with a plug in its mouth, while you’re talking on your cell phone, then you’re misusing a pacifier.” But otherwise, some liberal use for comfort in the early weeks and use at sleeping times later was, in her mind, not just appropriate but NECESSARY for many babies/families.

Which was music to our ears. Henry spent the entire hospital stay at breast or screaming. He almost never slept, unless he was nursing, and in the three days I was in the hospital? The only hours that I slept were when he physically left the room to go and get his wiener sliced (see the inaugural ControverSunday post at Our Lady of Perpetual Breadcrumbs comment section for more info), and one night where he sucked on Baby Daddy’s finger for 2 hours straight.

The finger trick was shown to us by those pacifier-denying nurses, of course. Thank god on the second night one of them mentioned this as a possibility, as I hadn’t slept in days and Henry could not be comforted by anything other than sucking. Though breastfeeding worked for me, in the hospital my nipples were cracked and bleeding and developing blisters from that little nurse-machine. I think that, what with our near constant nursing, a little use of a pacifier in the ten minutes between nursing sessions would have been okay, you know?

So when we got home and okay’ed it with the good doctor, we set about finding “the one.”

Unfortunately, he never really took to a pacifier. We had a month or two early on that he would take a Soothie brand maybe thirty percent of the time he was offered it, but by around 3 months he wasn’t having it. And it never allowed me any extra sleep, just got him to calm down during car trips and things like that. Which is helpful, but I would have appreciated his willingness to use one at night, is all I’m sayin.’ Before we landed on the Soothie and accepted that it was only a partial fix, we tried out a couple of other brands (as you can see on your right, he took that Nuk brand when he was a few days old, but then never again) and ended up with a bunch of random binkies in a drawer. When he was 6 months old and hadn’t been using a pacifier for months, I grabbed one (a Mam) from the junk drawer and put it in our traveling bag for a plane trip, and lo! not only was it a new and novel toy, he put it in his mouth and sucked on it. And fell asleep for half the plane trip. And totally kind of used it while we were in Arizona. When we got back to Wisconsin? Nope. And that was the end of his pacifier use. Not including stealing them out of other babies’ mouths and chewing on them, usually backwards. He loves to do that.

So my opinion on pacifier use: the parent can gauge what appropriate use is for their kid. This may be more or less frequently or at different times/in different situations than other people’s kids. Excepting that extreme example from my pediatrician, I trust people to figure it out. Now, that said, I have seen people forcing binkies into babies’ mouths more often than I would necessarily like. But generally this is in a public space where they are just trying to keep the kid “pacified” for a moment before they can get him/her separated from the crowd to then deal with the actual cause of the meltdown. What I’m saying is don’t assume you know why someone is “plugging” their child. It’s probably out of courtesy to YOU, and the kid’s needs will be met shortly. (Again, we’ve all likely seen “paci abuse” as well, and spotted much-too-old children using them, but that doesn’t mean they should be outlawed–and in the case of an acquaintance’s autistic 7-year-old who finds a good old fashioned pacifier comforting and calming? Give the kid a damn pacifier if that’s what works, there are extenuating circumstances, yo).

Oh, and as to the other “comfort objects” in Henry’s life. Nope, not really. He seemed to want to find his thumb early on, he found it, I snapped a picture of him sucking on it, and he never did it again. Seriously. I’ve written about the mixed results of the Wubbanub. He has never shown any preference for a “lovey” or comfort blanket/toy. He may hug a stuffed animal if I put it in his crib, but is unconcerned if it’s not there later, and has never reached for an stuffed toy with any recognition of its merits as a pal/soft thing/imitation of being. Ditto for a blanket, which I’ve been putting in his crib for essentially no reason as it doesn’t stay on him for more than a moment and he again doesn’t seem to notice its presence.

I, on the other hand, had (and still have) Ellie, my stuffed aligator which I was stereotypically attached to past the point of social appropriateness, and had to have a DEVICE placed in my MOUTH to prevent me from thumb sucking. I did do damage to my teeth (I was hopelessly buck-teethed as a young person) and the only way to get me to stop was a metal piece preventing my thumb from fitting in my mouth. Yeah. I should be glad Henry didn’t go for thumb sucking.

I wanted to write this post about the whole “he’s using you as a pacifier!” line that I got often (and still get) from people in my life who have been slightly critical of how much/often I nurse Hank, but come on this thing has dragged on enough already. Another time.