The Great Dummy Debate – A Personal Perspective From An IBCLC
Posted by Stacey Revie on Mar 5, 2012 in Before Baby Arrives, Blog, Breastfeeding Challenges, Lactation Consulting, Painful Breastfeeding, Parenting Your Breastfed Baby | 0 comments All my children had dummies…. Was this a good thing? The answer is both yes and no for me. For my first child, having a dummy was the means to an end and also the beginning of a slippery slope to early weaning. When I brought my first beautiful newborn baby home from hospital, I was elated. This lovely scene came crashing down around me when breastfeeding went very wrong. My baby was drowsy and I was getting more and more frustrated that she wasn’t feeding. Eventually after she became more alert, she REALLY wanted to feed. By this stage breastfeeding was excruciating. I dreaded attaching this beautiful little bubba to my breast to feed. I started trying anything I could to delay feeding her and stretch the feeds out. This inevitably led to using a dummy. There were two things wrong with this. Firstly, she was crying because she wanted to feed and make up for the days that she had been drowsy. She was showing me all the feeding cues and I just didn’t recognise them. Also, my breasts were not getting the stimulation they needed to make the amount of milk my baby needed. Secondly, she was already attaching poorly and introducing a foreign teat which in no way stretches and functions like a breast was, in my opinion, contributing to her trouble. In the end I couldn’t face the toe-curling pain with each feed and chose to express my breastmilk and feed it to her with a bottle. I was disappointed and sad that breastfeeding hadn’t worked out for me. It wasn’t all about the dummy, but it certainly didn’t help. My second and third babies also had dummies. This time around I was more informed and more determined to get things right. So I chose to focus on establishing breastfeeding as a priority after I had the baby – electing to use other settling techniques and delaying the use of a dummy until about 6-8 weeks. When I did use the dummy it was sparingly and when I knew that the baby’s tummy was full. I tuned into my babies and looked for feeding cues, I also realised that I had a limited milk storage capacity and that my babies really NEEDED to feed frequently to thrive – which they did. I used the dummy to help them to get to sleep, in the car...read more