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Can a Young Baby Suck Too Much?
Some authors warn parents not to let their babies suck “too much,”
cautioning that sucking is habit-forming. (I wonder if, given the
option, these experts would reach into your womb and pull your
baby’s thumb right out of her mouth!) Fortunately, it’s impossible
for young babies to suck too much. Sucking isn’t candy or an
addiction; it’s a highly sophisticated, self-calming tool. It’s an
integral part of the fourth trimester and one of your baby’s first
steps toward self-reliance.
The same deep calm that’s activated in your baby’s brain by sucking
can also be switched on in the brains of older kids and adults by other
“sucking” experiences, such as lollipop licking, cigarette smoking, and
nail biting. (No wonder psychologists compare cigar smoking to thumb
sucking!)
Many studies have shown that non-nutritive sucking is healthy for
babies. It’s like vitamin S! It lessens stress (blood pressure, heart rate,
etc.) and can stimulate the release of natural pain-relieving chemicals in
a baby’s brain that decrease suffering from shots, blood tests, or
circumcisions. Scientists have also found that premature babies who
suck pacifiers grow faster, and full-term babies who are “paci” suckers
have a lower risk of SIDS.
Once Upon a Time: How Parents Have Used Sucking in

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Once Upon a Time: How Parents Have Used Sucking in
Other Times and Cultures
Have you ever noticed how nicely your baby falls asleep while
sucking? Most babies just soften like melted butter. Of course, mothers
throughout time have traditionally satisfied their infants’ need to suck
the old-fashioned way, with the breast. Mother’s milk is the center of an
infant’s world—which is why some people even refer to breastfeeding
moms as Earth Mothers.
But, rather than Earth Mother, I think a breastfeeding mom should be
called Galactic Goddess! That’s because the ancient Greeks invented the
words galaxy and galactic out of their word gala, meaning milk. Legend
said that the stars in the heavens came from milk spraying out of the
breasts of the goddess Juno, which is also why we call our galaxy the
Milky Way.
For mothers from tribes like the Efé of Zaire and the !Kung San of
Botswana, sucking is usually the first solution they try to calm their
babies. At the least little squawk, these moms plunk their babies onto
the boob thirty, forty, one hundred times a day!
In past centuries, it was common in some cultures to put sugar inside a
rag for babies to suck on. Sometimes this “sugar teat” was dunked in
brandy if a baby was particularly fussy. My friend Celia, raised in Russia
in the 1920s, remembers that her neighbors, unable to afford sugar,
instead offered colicky babies a small piece of chewed-up bread wrapped
in a thin cloth.
As rubber nipples for bottles became popular in the early 1900s, so
did rubber pacifiers for sucking on. The English called these “dummies,”
choosing this name not because a baby looked dumb with a pacifier in
the mouth, but because these little rubber teats silenced cries so quickly.