Every new parent dreams of the day their baby learns to self-soothe. After all, waking up every hour to rock your little one back to sleep or replace their lost pacifier isn't exactly ideal. But thanks to one U.K. mom, we now have a genius trick that can help parents catch a few more Zs at night.
Essex mom Laura Gerson recently shared her parenting hack in the closed Facebook group The Motherload, and it's so simple, you'll wonder why you never thought of it yourself.
After noticing her baby girl, Amelia, kept crying at night after losing her pacifier, Gerson started putting her daughter to bed with 10 pacifiers! The mom revealed that this unusual bedtime routine has been going on since Amelia was three months old, and eight months later, it still works like a charm.
"Found that when she cried [at] night all she wanted was a dummy then she'd go back off," Gerson explained. "Trial and error with her losing a few down the side but 99 per cent of the time she feels around, finds a dummy, sticks it in and she's sorted!"
In an interview with PopSugar, Gerson noted that her daughter "isn't a total dummy-fiend" and doesn't even use them in the day. However, the soother has become her go-to comfort object when she sleeps.
"It really soothes her having them through the night, and having more in there makes it easy for her to find one and hold one (or two)," the mom told PopSugar. "Just made sense that if that was all she wanted to make it easier for her to get to them without getting herself stressed when she couldn't. Happy baby, happy mummy!"
Gerson's reasoning is totally fair because, really, who would turn down the chance to have uninterrupted sleep?
However, the Essex mom did note in her Facebook post that she is worried about "the time when the 'Dummy Fairy' comes to take them away."
According to BabyCenter Canada, by the time children reach the age of two or three, they're drive to suck won't be as strong as when they were infants, which makes it a great time to start weaning them off the soother.
Additionally, Dr. Richard Dowell, a pediatric neuropsychologist based in Pennsylvania, says that children around this age should easily be able to find other ways to self-soothe.
"Ultimately, children develop higher level strategies to manage their distress — usually beginning at around age two," he explained to Parents.com. "They phase out their pacifiers as they develop skills to replace them."
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