At the heart of parenting is the hope and desire that your kids will have a better life than you had. In my case, I’ve had it pretty easy. Things haven’t been handed to me – I’ve worked hard for what I’ve achieved – but I’ve been blessed with an awesome family, great friends, good health and virtually no traumatic experiences.
And I want all of that for my children. But I want more, too. So I was very excited when our youngest llama recently decided to quit sucking her thumb.
For one thing, she was not a casual sucker. She didn’t just do it when she was tired or needed to be comforted. It was a 24/7 hobby and habit that I dreaded breaking her of, even though I knew what the future held if she did not stop: years and years of orthodontia.
She may still need braces, but perhaps by ceasing the endless sucking now, she won’t have to endure what I – a closet sucker until age eight – had to from an evil doctor I’ll refer to as Sperry Z. to preserve his anonymity. Actually, he was a nice enough man, but he practiced barbaric dentistry, most likely with medieval torture devices he found on eBay (had that existed in the late 1970s).
Dr. Z told my parents he couldn’t fix my mouth without breaking my jaws, but when my parents vetoed that route of therapy, he took me on as an experiment and vowed to correct my teeth through sheer force and pain. I was a lab rat with a severe overbite.
But I digress – back to our daughter. I am so happy that my husband and I won’t have to formulate an anti-thumb sucking campaign in our house. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years from potty training and teaching our girls to be good sleepers, little llamas have strong wills. And the drama tends to go away the minute it becomes their idea to use the toilet, slumber through the night in their own bed or quit sucking their thumb – all the things they control on their own.
We didn’t have to resort to threats or rewards. We didn’t have to beg or plead or smear any disgusting but edible concoctions on the targeted thumb to deter sucking. We didn’t have to send her to Dr. Phil or the Betty Ford Center for digit addictions.
She decided on her own and quit cold turkey. And that makes Mama Llama, currently without dental insurance, very, very happy.
1 comment:
This week I was surprised to learn that our "bite and bring blood girl" will likely need two years of orthodontics because her top teeth go too far over the bottom ones. I was sure our passionate finger sucker would be the one in dire need of that service, but I'm told she's still in the game for great teeth. Go figure!
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