Yes. Pacifiers provide substitute contact and are often used in a contactless, mechanical way (the current “fashion”) and/or to keep children quiet. They interfere with the child’s ability to learn how to regulate oral needs, leaving a chronic sense of oral dissatisfaction. This may contribute significantly to laying the foundation for eating disorders and possibly obesity in later life.
The practice of providing substitute contact often continues in older children. Like pacifiers, television and video and computer games become substitutes for normal play, activities which are necessary for the child’s overall development, especially the work function.
Perhaps if parents were in better contact with their children, pacifiers would not be necessary.
1 Comment
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 
Ultimately the breastfeeding contact stage, mother and child love, if satisfied, and if allowed to naturally developmentally exhaust itself, and not be thwarted early, would ease much of this need for pacifiers?