Pacifier weaning - the slow approach

We just weaned our kid from the pacifier! YAY US! I'd like to share how we did it, because it's different from what I usually read here.To provide some background: my son has been addicted to his paci. From very young on he found comfort in it and used it many hours a day. After discussing with our doctor and doing our own research we decided that it's okay to wait until he is three before we do something.So he turned 3. After considering many options we decided to do it slowly and stepwise. First step was to not give it to him if during the day if he was not asleep - this was in so far challenging, as he would still throw tantrums for his paci if he was hurt or otherwise upset. We introduced a sticker chart: if he managed to use his paci only for sleeping he would get a sticker. After 7 stickers a small toy. The first two days I was super lenient, because I wanted him to succeed and see that it was doable. Then I was more strict: there were a couple of days where he didn't get a sticker. After the seven days, we prolonged the sticker chart, for another 15 days or so, at the end of which he would get another toy. It worked pretty well. After a while he stopped crying for his paci when he was upset and would calm down with his lovey only (the challenge here was that he associated his lovey with his paci: no paci without his lovey, no lovey without paci). There were still a few situations that were challenging, like on longer car rides, but we managed those pretty well with distracting and things like a bottle of water.Once this was achieved, nighttime weaning was on the list. Here we extended his bed time ritual a bit by telling him a story after lights out. We would delay giving him the paci as long as possible and after a while he forgot to ask for it. In these cases he fell asleep without it. During the night we distracted again with water or something else. There have been a couple of nights, where he would not be distracted, then we gave it to him. Again after a while, he managed to sleep through the night without asking.All in all, the process took 2.5 months. I am very glad we went that way, because it went quite smoothly and without tears. We could have/should have started with it earlier, but as said we had reasons.Other approaches we thought of were the tooth fairy, but when we tried to introduce it, our poor boy got anxiety and was really defensive. Cold turkey seemed to be a breach of trust, plus it would have taken days until he would feel comfortable without it and I didn't want to go through that myself. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2pNNdo7