For years the pacifier has been used to comfort children, but is the risk really worth the benefit?
Here’s a little background info:
Babies are born with something called a suckling reflex which involves a front to back movement of the tongue. This allows the tongue to be deeply cupped so that the infant can extract milk while breast-feeding. The reflex of suckling while breast-feeding creates a tight contact of the baby’s lips around the mother’s breast. The lower jaw also moves forward in synergy with the tongue so that a negative pressure is formed in the baby’s mouth allowing for efficient aspiration of milk. Correct breast-feeding and suckling determines a newborn’s facial growth, and develops muscles, oral functions, and facial bony structures by generating considerable intermittent forces. This reduces the risk of the baby developing facial abnormalities, like an overbite, a deep bite, deficient lower jaw, etc.
The baby is able to control the suckling reflex starting at about 2-3 months, and typically suckling should disappear by 6-12 months of age when the baby develops a more mature pattern of sucking which allows the baby to transition into solid foods.
The action of sucking is different from suckling in that it involves more of an up and down movement of the tongue and it also involves more active use of the lips and elevation of the tongue to the palate. By about 4 months a baby should have established a true sucking pattern which allows the tongue to seal the first one-third of the mouth. These are all steps in developing a more mature swallowing pattern.
So what is a pacifier actually doing?
With use of a pacifier the suckling reflex continues (often long past the normal time that it should exist) because it encourages the front-back motion of the tongue. Continued use of a pacifier, or even bottle feeding, causes the tongue and cheek muscles to develop a compensating function that is not normal. Pacifiers lack the ability to create the important negative pressure in the baby’s mouth that breast-feeding does, therefore the forward movements of the lower jaw and tongue are decreased. Overtime, this causes an adaptation to form and function that can change the dental and facial bony structures which will lead to incorrect ways that the teeth come together, also known as malocclusions.
While the medical community has put out several statements regarding pacifiers and their potential benefit in decreasing the risk of SIDS, there is also a very real risk of affecting facial development and growth with long-term use of a pacifier. And while I am in no way discounting the research the medical community has done, I do question how this research has been done, because I assume it is unlikely one child was put at risk of greater incidence with no pacifier while you see if there is a benefit to another child. As with anything, it is your decision to make for your child based on information you have gathered.
What I can tell you though, is that pacifiers, from the very first use, start to change how a baby sucks, the tongue position, and ultimately can affect facial bony formation, which in turn will ultimately affect the development of the airway and breathing. And while initial use may not cause irreversible harm, prolonged use absolutely does.
So I leave you with this final thought. If pacifiers don’t have any sort of nutritive function, their sole purpose being to quite a crying baby and then developing a non-functional habit for the child, I ask you this….were the pacifiers designed to benefit the baby, or to pacify the parents?