Should I give her the dummy?

[sparkler]

After many restless nights getting up to plug in the dummy, and only catnapping in the day, I am trying to teach DD (8 months) to settle without it.

If I leave her a few minutes without dummy to cry and then go in to settle her she just get angry and screams more because she wants her dummy. If she wont settle with gentle patting, rocking or singing and is getting hysterical is giving in and giving her the dummy to settle just making the situation worse???

Has anyone had any luck teaching their babies to self settle during naps and at night without having to stop the dummy altogether?

Any advice ot tips appreciated, THANKS :baby:

[justmum]

I went through this a few months ago. I used the dummy to settle DS combined with pats, humming, shhing etc and then took the dummy out of his mouth before he fell asleep whilst continuing with the patting, shhhing, humming etc to sort of disguise the loss of the dummy.

As time went on I could take the dummy away earlier and earlier until he didn't need it anymore. Took about 3 days. Yes. it's hard, but being dummy free is :goodvibes: because I don't have to go into him 8 times a night to plug it back in. On the other hand, he is harder to settle generally because he used to go into a sooky trance with the dummy and i don't have that as a settling weapon anymore. But, in all, I think we are better off without the dummy now.

HTH

[shelleymarie]

I recommed getting rid of the dummy as early as possible, my daughter is 2 and it is so hard trying to get her off it at this age. We left it so late because we emigrated so didn't want to disrupt her even more by getting rid of it before all the stress of moving to the other side of the world but now wish we had just stopped it at a much earlier age.
Now we have all the tantrums and it is so hard-:hair: we are very stressed!!!

[RmumR]

I had similar problems to what you have described with the waking etc due to wanting the dummy back so we decided to go dummy free. It was very very hard for the first week (DD is just 7mths today) but now much easier and no more getting up to put the dummy back in.