It’s enough to make you batty! Night after night you head to your crying baby’s room because the pacifier’s lost. So when Baby wakes he can’t soothe himself to fall back asleep on his own. What do you do?
Most babies who use pacifiers can plop the thing back in their mouths by 8 months of age, but it doesn’t help if the pacifier’s falling to the ground or getting wedged between the mattress and crib. Your choices aren’t easy now, says Jennifer Waldburger, author of The Sleep Easy Solution. You can either decide to end your baby’s dependency on the pacifier or let him cry it out, which is going to happen anyway if he’s really attached to his passy. The bottom line? You’re either going to keep getting up to retrieve that binky for your baby or your not. Breaking a pacifier dependency can take a couple of days and be very hard at first — on everyone. But eventually your baby will be able to go to sleep without it and not need it again.