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What helps kids to cease sucking their fingers or thumbs? These same principles can prove useful for grownups who want to overcome mistaken-things-we-put-in-our-mouths like excessive food, alcohol and drugs, or cigarettes. Read More
Shame
It's amazing how much better public shame works as a behavior modifier for children than it does for adults. Actually, maybe the diff is that all kids get shamed by all their peers for thumbsucking, eventually, but very few adults get shamed by all their peers for drinking too much, smoking too much, gambling too much, or the like.
Peer power and shame, for better and for worse
Yes, the impulse to fit in with peers is powerful. No one wants to feel left out. And the essence of shame is feeling that one looks poorly in front of others.
Societies need these phenomena like athletics need rules and lines on the court so people learn to play in bounds. When there are no boundaries or rules, and people are left to figure out each for themselves what will be good for them, both individual people and their societies are less likely to thrive.
One can overdo shame and rules also. That's when individuals and societies become overly constricted. Another word for constricted is neurotic.
Thanks for your thought-provoking observations on shame.
drh
Awww, C'mon!!
Now we are regulating thumb-sucking to an "addiction"!?
Poor babies and little kids.
It's like everything now is considered an addiction.
What converts a benign habit into an addiction?
Thank you Alice for highlighting a point that I can see from your comment I didn't clarify in the article.
An addition is a habit that persists when it has detrimental impacts on one's personal and/or work life.
Thumbsucking is normal and even helpful for infants and toddlers.
By age 4 or so, the later preschool years, public sucking makes a child look babyish so it is beginning to be detrimental socially. Strong sucking, as opposed to just dangling the thumb in the mouth, also can change the shape of the roof of the mouth. Molding around the shape of the thumb it can become high and narrow which is a less attracdtive shape.
By the early school years, ages 5 and 6, ublic sucking definitely makes a child look babyish. IN addition, the permanent teeth are coming in, so sucking habits will potentially have lifelong impacts on appearance, even with orthodonture as teeth tend to move back after braces unless the child is consistent in wearing a retainer.
Beg to differ
Isn't an addiction an addiction, period? If a multi-billionare drinks a quart of vodka a day, he's an alcoholic, even if he doesn't have to work, and people are still sucking up to him because of how wealthy he is.
Yes, with a question....
I totally agree with you on the alcoholic billionaire. If he keeps drinking at a rate that's bad for his health, and no doubt unpleasant for everyone around him, that's addiction in my view as well as yours.
The clinical definition of addiction, which is continuing to do something that's harmful to a person's ability to relate to family and friends and/or work should also have something about harmful to personal health. I'm not sure if it does, and I'm writing from home where I don't have my dsm diagnostic definitions. Can someone there help me out with that information?
In general though if you keep doing something that's self-injurious, the label addiction is an option...
drh
DSM not so helpful!
DSM doesn't define "alcoholism. It calls it "alcohol dependence." And it defines it thusly (there would be no comparable definition for, um, thumbsucking! Or sex, for that matter).
Addictions involve a certain consciousness on the part of the person so addicted that it would be "better" to stop, but yet they can't stop. Can a three-year-old have that kind of volition? :)
"For alcohol dependence, at least three out of seven of the following criteria must be manifest during a 12 month period:
* Tolerance
* Withdrawal symptoms or clinically defined Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome
* Use in larger amounts or for longer periods than intended
* Persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down on alcohol use
* Time is spent obtaining alcohol or recovering from effects
* Social, occupational and recreational pursuits are given up or reduced because of alcohol use
* Use is continued despite knowledge of alcohol-related harm (physical or psychological)"
Christopher Hitchens was obviously an alcoholic. But it had no effect on his work life, he was happily married by all accounts, and had more friends than most of us ever will. He died from something else.
The young child's experience of "addiction"
Kids vary hugely in how thumb-dependent they become. Like an occasional-beerdrinker, going without is relatively easy.
For a child who has become used to having his thumb in his mouth most of the day, or always at a specific times like going to sleep at night or when he's upset, going without the thumb at those times feels overwhelmingly difficult.
You question whether 3 year olds can want to quit and find themselves in a struggle with ending the habit. In general, something seems to happen between ages 3 and 4 that motivation to stop is easier to trigger, and self-awareness becomes strong enough that blocking the impulse can be effective.
At the same time, the yearning for the thumb can be terribly potent, and in this regard is very much like a withdrawal symptom. Their body is used to being regulated with the thumb, and self-soothing and/or falling asleep can feel impossible at first without it.
It is common for children to have several unsuccessful forrays at quitting before they finally succeed.
It is common also for chidren to hide in their room for a few secret sucks during the phase of struggle when they want to end the habit and yet can't seem to fully stop it.
Practically no one
Practically no one still sucks their thumb as an adult. The age at which an "addicted" kid is able to stop is the age at which that kid is able to internalize the notions of shame and humiliation from one's peers (as opposed to one's parents).
That's probably right at the start of pre-school.
Case Study (hahaha)
My sister and I were thumb suckers. I was actually born with my thumb in my mouth (they thought I was dead until my shoulders came out which...pop! removed my thumb..)
We grew up with an alcoholic father so I think the thumb sucking was our self-soother. No dental problems, perfectly straight teeth (thank god, because we couldn't have afforded braces)
I started working at age 10 (babysitting) and had my first real job on a farm by age 13. My sister is the straight A honor student who became a nurse (she's really good). (I'm a shrink)
We both stopped thumbsucking on our own timeline with no public humilition. Our family made jokes about the habit (whats it taste like? must be good! or they encouraged us by admiring the cuteness; especially my baby sister; what's cuter than giant brown eyes peeking over a chubby little balled up hand? but otherwise to us it was just what we did, no big deal. Our mother was not dramatic.) I think we were impervious to peer shame because we were forced to embrace poverty...I think that trumped a benign habit. ?
We both smoked in our late teens and early 20's. (parents were smokers; our smoking was NOT encouraged and we already knew better)
We both developed eating disorders; bulimia and anorexia (me)
We're both recovered enough from our oral fixations to live healthy (smoke free) and happy lives through good use of support and awareness. (occasional ED relapses with tons of insight and alittle co-dependent enmeshment, but she lives in alaska and I live florida so we get healthy distance)
And we have both admitted in the sacred secretness of sisterhood that once every 4 years or so if we are particularly emotionally exhausted or regressed by a major stressor...we revisit the thumb to fall asleep. (which I think is better than smoking, bingeing or purging or becoming alcoholics, which thank god, we didn't since the genes are on both sides)
adult thumb sucking
Some years back (in the 1980's) the Wall Street Journal did a story on adult thumbsucking. There's lots of folks who do it, they found.
In cases like yours where the activity is a)in the privacy of home and b) not a problem with teeth and facial appearance, I totally agree that sucking on a thumb, pacifier or fingers is a fine self-soother--just like for preemie babies. It puts you in a meditation-like physiological state of optimal calm, with no side effects. Go for it!
Children self-soothe to cope with stress and abuse
My mother had borderline personality disorder, with some traits of narcissistic pd, and obsessive-compulsive pd. She was very controlling and perfectionistic, a screamer and rager, would often resort to physical abuse, and she had a hair-trigger temper. My little Sister and I grew up in a highly stressful environment, and learned to self-soothe in order to cope with the chronic anxiety and stress.
Sister self-soothed by sucking her thumb whenever she could, and twirling her hair. The thumb-sucking made her teeth protrude and she wound up needing braces to correct her overbite, and the hair-twirling caused her hair to break and even caused a little bald spot on her scalp.
I became a very jittery child, had frequent nightmares and a pronounced startle reflex if mother made a sudden, unexpected move anywhere near me. I self-soothed by biting my fingernails until they bled. My mother made things particularly stressful and hostile at the dinner table, so much so that I lost my appetite and became rather underweight as a young child. At one point she forced me to eat something I did not want to eat: forced me to the point of making me choke, gag and vomit. This of course got me screamed at and punished for not eating and for making a mess. Like I said, I think this level of abuse constitutes child torture. There are even rules about humane treatment of prisoners of war that apparently don't apply to children.
The stress level at my house was fairly constant, and at one point (around age 5, I think) I discovered that masturbating was another way to self-soothe. Of course, when mother discovered that I was engaging in THAT behavior (even though I tried to keep it very private) she went totally batshit ballistic and flew into a rage that is seared into my brain permanently; I now believe it resulted in me becoming trauma-bonded or betrayal-bonded to her; I though she was going to kill me, so I stopped being "me" and became mother's mini-me instead, up until my mid-30's.
I retain most of my childhood memories but almost totally cut myself off from my emotions; my little Sister has almost no childhood memories at all. Now that we are both in late middle age, I'm beginning to be able to access my emotions again, and Sister is gaining back some of her childhood memories.
In my opinion, what was done to my little Sister and me constitutes criminal child abuse or child torture. What really needed to be done to resolve our "addictions" was to remove my Sister and me from our mentally ill, raging, screaming, battering mother, but instead we were shamed and punished for trying to cope with the stress and anxiety the only way we could: thumb-sucking, nail-biting, and other self-soothing mechanisms.
If that's not torture, I don't know what is.
Annie
I am so sorry. I had a raging mother also (no father around)....I never knew when I came home from school, if she would be calm or screaming, hitting my sister and I, or crying.
She actually ran away from home (usually it is the child who does that); she packed a suitcase and walked out. We had NO other relatives. She did come back. she needed to be on major medication.
My escape was to join the army (then I "married" the original abuser/mother and tried to fix the past....for 36 years); got the courage to get a divorce, then was spiritually abused by my church of 31 years.
Fortunately, I was born standin' up and talkin' back.
yes, what you endured was torture.
I had a neighbor woman hold my hand over an open fire (I cannot remember what/if my mother did or said to that icky drunken woman.
Molested by a drunken neighbor, when "mother" left us alone a night.
It wasn't enough to be abused, but we were poverty-stricken: No car, refrigerator, phone, bathtub or shower. Snow came in thru a crack in the shed.
The final insult was that the tenement house (120-years old) was known by a nickname (the name wasn't bad), but I felt so much shame that it wasn't like anyone elses house...No one elses house had a name...Anyway, i am SO sorry about the torture you went thru. Sadly child abuse continues and I am doing all I can to get this into the media; 1 in 3 women are living in silence, fear and shame behind closed doors; I want to appear on National TV and make a documentary called:
The Silent Scream. Love to you dear survivor; Alice
www.soulpoetry.org is my book called Sanctuary of the Soul
I put my soul in it.
Late thumbsucking CAN be a sign folks need to heed.
Thank you Alice and Annie for sharing your poignant stories. They strongly remind me of point that I did not make in my post, which is that teachers or other adults who see a child still sucking a thumb or fingers beyond the preschool years MUST check out if this is a heads up that something's wrong at home.
If someone like a teacher or a neighbor had noticed your need to self-soothe, they could have intervened to save you from dreadful home circumstances.
I do hope that as a result of your sharing your stories, readers will be more alert and more willing to speak up on behalf of a child they know who needs help.
The sad truth
The sad truth is that my little Sister and I only self-soothed in private; there was really no opportunity for a teacher to notice Sister's thumb-sucking, and I became adept at hiding my hands so that my bleeding nail-beds were not obvious. Our mother was high-functioning; everyone outside the home thought my mother was just adorable and charming. Our abuse and mistreatment only occurred in the privacy of our home or car; mom never, ever hit me or screamed at me in public. That would have destroyed her public perception of being a "perfect" wife and mother.
The sad truth is that the children of high-functioning personality disordered parents are screwed.
The only person who can really make a difference is the other parent, but those with Cluster B pds usually tend to select and marry a weak, emotionally dependent, enabling spouse.
But I agree that more education and training of mandated reporters like teachers is urgently needed.
-Annie
very poignant
I heard just today of a case similar to what you experienced. Your writing to me adds to my personal motivation to see what I or someone can do to help the children.
Thanks again Annie for sharing with us.
drh
there is a great product
there is a great product called Thumbuddy To Love and it helps children break the thumb sucking habit in a fun and positive way. kids love it and you can google Thumbuddy to Love or get it on Amazon.
thanks Jill for this information
Once a child wants to end a thumbsucking habit, products like the Thumbuddy you describe can be a big help.
drh
Lessons from Thumbsucking, the Earliest Addiction
I disagree, when children are born they have no habits, it's us the parents that create the habits, by placing the thumb of your baby in it's mouth, or by adding a pacifier to your baby's mouth. We are the creators of habit for our children. Then when we decide or society tells us to we work on having our child remove the thumb or pacifier and then bottle. We create the habits and then take them away. We see our parents chewing on a pencil and then our children follow suit. We watch our parents bite their nails and children follow suit, I can go on and one. Habits are a continuous cycle.
Again
Babies are BORN with the sucking reflex, some babies are born actually sucking their thumbs!
Teachers AND adults in society should be able to see signs of abuse in a child.
MOST fall through the cracks (as I did)....no signs of bruises or obvious signs of distress outwardly.
Being and HSP (Highly sensitive personality), I don't miss much.
Smoking
P.S. yes, adults can be shamed......do you know how many times people feel free to comment on my smoking?!
Thumbsucking
This was a very interesting read including everyone's comments. We as people seem to think in ways that to understand things we like to group and classify things and it puzzles us when something doesn't fit the mold. So we classify addition and self-destructive behaviors and then we like to draw connections and make up cause-effect relationships that fit perfectly and logically. But we must be cautious about this because people, perhaps especially parents who are trying to do right by their children and ensure their best future, are prone to panic. A mother reads something like this and thinks oh my! I have to get my child to stop or he/she will become socially unacceptable!
I sucked my thumb from infancy to 13. I have never had any facial or dental malformation. My parents tried just about every trick in the book to make me stop and not one thing worked. Not replacing with a paci which i gagged on, not shame, not grown-up talk, not bitter things, not nail polish..... i can go on.... I don't remember any of those things particularly bothering me, and i do remember trying to please my family and stop, but it simply didn't happen. It wasn't torture or struggle, it wasn't just too hard to quit, it just wasn't that big of a deal to me, and that's all that seemed to matter. I as I grew up I was only sucking in private, but i was not really ashamed of it. The reason I stopped at 13 was that it just didn't feel right and i had no need for it. But now looking back it seemed to have coincided with the period when i got my first crush and first became interested in boy-girl relationships. Not saying the two are connected, or that one interest replaced the other. I think i just developed past the soothing from sucking, basically grew up.
I have never smoked, did drugs, drank alcohol etc. I am actually regarded as the one with extremely good ability to cope with stress and the one sought after to help others. I have had my good share of stress in childhood and and coping came natural, i didn't run in a corner to suck my thumb when things got hard, the sucking wasn't the main or only coping mechanism. And the stress i am referring to is one from a civil war tearing my country when I was 8, and my entire family getting chased out of our homes into perpetual refugee status around the world. We moved to 4 different countries before I was 14. But before I was 8 and happily sucking away i had a storybook childhood some kids only dream of.
So just saying stress or no stress as a kid i was sucking. It's not an impediment, or a problem parents should overly dwell on. Sure, be careful of teeth development, but I don't think that psychologically it has as big of an impact as we may think. I believe our personality is not affected by it so much. I think we grow up into who we are regardless of the thumb sucking and it certainly does not mean that just because a kid is sucking his/her thumb that it will have a propensity to addictive behavior further in life (as someone might conclude upon reading this article and comments).
Sorry for the long story, and thank you all for your insight, this was wonderful reading and it is very nice to see discussions about the topic.
Fascinating
To SPW,
I was very touched by your posting.
Would you be willing to share on my blog a guest blogpost about the five biggest stresses experienced by an 8 to 14 year old child who was faced with war and then with becoming a refugee?
Posts are usualy under 1000 words, but this one could go longer as I'm sure that multiple key moments will come to mind.
The Stresses Civil War Brings to a Happy 8 Year Old Kid would make fascinating reading. How would you feel about writing and sharing this with your fellow PT readers?
drh
Dear Dr. Heitler, Thank you!
Dear Dr. Heitler,
Thank you! It would be my pleasure and honor to share some of my life experiences with you and PT readers. I have never really done anything like that so let me know how to go about it.
SPW
To contact me directly
SPW, To contact me directly return to the Thumbsucking posting. At the bottom of each of the two pages it says Email Blogger. Click there.
As to how to go about it, I've actually written a blog post on a strategy for writing about life incidents that were important to you. It's at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201201/winni....
I think that links aren't live from this Comments page. Probably you'll have to cut and past the link onto your browser.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201201/winni...
I'm so glad this project interests you! War and the homelessness of refugees are, to our good fortune, mostly phenomena that Americans who have been here for a generation or more have never experienced. I look forward to reading what you write.
drh
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