The Child Who Sucks His Thumb

Thumb-sucking arises from the natural inclination of the hungry child, who wants to put everything into his mouth. It is a habit natural in every respect, indulged in by nearly all children at some time or other in their childhood. It has very often been observed that infants take to sucking their thumbs with complete contentment a few minutes after they are born. But it has been noted that this habit becomes most common among infants between the ages of three and six months. The Creator has furnished the lips and the tongue with nerves of the utmost sensitivity, so that the child may learn a great deal about hardness, softness, and the taste of strange things by putting everything into his mouth. This hand-to-mouth instinct is highly active during the first six months, but it should diminish by the ninth month and fade away when the child reaches twelve months. In other words, the child should give up this infantile pleasure gradually, replacing it with dolls and other playthings. But if he has nothing to amuse him and occupy his hands, he may be driven to suck his fingers and his thumb out of sheer boredom, and this can very easily develop into a bad habit.

Can thumb-sucking be prevented, then? The answer depends greatly on the child's age. If the child is a year old or a little more, and does not indulge in this habit very often, it is best to turn a blind eye to it; or, at most, he should be told in a gentle, calm way that he has reached an age at which it is unbecoming for him to indulge in such matters, which belong to nursing infants younger than he is, and that big children like him do not indulge in them, so that there is no reason at all for him to practice them. But if the child has reached his second or third year and is still practicing this habit, measures must be taken to stop him, for thumb-sucking leads to two serious things. The first is the deformation of the shape of the teeth, since the upper front teeth are forced forward by the thumb and the lower teeth backward, so that the incisor teeth are left deformed and ugly to look at. This deformity requires long treatment by a skilled dentist, and care extending over many months to correct that defect. Such treatment is arduous and very costly, and the child may be obliged to wear artificial teeth for many years. The second matter is that there is a risk the child runs when he faces difficulties: that of becoming addicted to sucking his thumb to relieve and console himself instead of facing the difficulties that confront him. If the parents want their child to grow up strong in character, they must train him to accept life's roughness and its smoothness alike, so that he becomes self-reliant.

It is clear, then, how wrong it is to foster this habit. I have seen some mothers push their children's thumbs into their mouths when they begin to cry, while others use pacifiers to perform this task. The mother who allows such methods to be used is nothing but lazy in the full sense of the word, and she does it only to rid herself of responsibility for her child.

What is to be done, then? The first thing you must do is not to make more fuss than necessary over this question, and not to let it develop into a battle in which wills collide. For the more you oppose your child in order to make him give up this habit, the greater grows his obstinacy and his insistence upon it, with crying and temper. Let him understand that all of it is folly and triviality with nothing to be gained from them, and that in any case he has grown big and the time has come for him to behave as big people behave and to cast off the ways and habits of infancy. Lavish on him the things that occupy his hands and that interest him more than anything else, so that he spends all his time with them. Let him understand that you appreciate his doubts and his troubles at their true worth, and all of this may fade away in a few weeks. It is sometimes advisable to bandage his thumb for ten days or thereabouts, alleging some imaginary ailment that has affected the joint of his thumb, or simply to stick a strip of adhesive tape on that thumb. In difficult cases it is best to call in the doctor, who may suggest other methods of treatment, such as sedative prescriptions for a fortnight.

I have seen children who sucked their thumbs every night because they were afraid of the dark, and the sucking served to calm their fright. And I have seen others who did it because they were suffering from some pain, and the sucking, it appears, eased that pain. In both cases it is a mistake to try to stop the habit by force; rather, you must find out the cause, if you can.