It is common to discuss the suitability of giving the baby a pacifier to calm him, because many positive things are said about him, but also many negative things.
Among the positive ones we find the possibility of calming the baby thanks to the suction and the fact that it prevents sudden death, because while it has a pacifier in the mouth and can suck it it is less likely to happen. Among the negatives we see the possibility that there is a confusion between the pacifier and the chest that may affect breastfeeding, the fact that a child makes fewer shots of breast milk by falling asleep sucking a pacifier and the difficulty, sometimes, of removing it in the future.
Now a recent investigation comes to add more wood to the fire by ensuring that the use of the pacifier in boys can affect their ability to imitate gestures being negative for their emotional development.
The WHO and the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) advocate a limitation in the use of the pacifier to avoid deformation of the gums and teeth and to prevent otitis, as it seems that there may be a relationship. However, there had never been talk about a child who uses the pacifier a lot could have worse communication with other people.
How was the study done
The study was conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the US, and it goes on to say that babies need to imitate the facial expressions of others to learn to communicate and to somehow feel the same as others feel ( or imply that we understand them). That is why it is easy to see babies smile when parents smile at them and it is possible to see them cry when they see someone crying.
This imitation that adults also do, although in a less conscious and intense way, is important for babies because they are beginning to enter an emotional world, to communicate in a non-verbal and they do it imitating gestures and facial expressions.
The problem for the child is that, if he frequently carries a pacifier in his mouth, his ability to imitate gestures is diminished, because much of the muscles of his face are worried about hold and suck the pacifier. Thus, according to the researchers, it is more difficult to learn to communicate.
Let's say that, at the beginning, to speak with them we use words that they don't understand, being the best way to communicate the tone of voice and the expressions of our face (which in fact we already unconsciously exaggerate when talking with babies). They intend then to imitate us to communicate in their own way, but with a pacifier their expressions are limited.
To do the study, the researchers looked for children aged six and seven who had spent a lot of time with pacifiers and saw that they had more difficulty imitating facial expressions than those who had used the pacifier less time. They also did a survey of university students observing that those who had more problems to empathize with others had spent more time with the pacifier and, as a third experiment, also with university students, they tested them to observe how they made decisions before emotional problems, seeing Again, those with lower scores used the pacifier longer.
However, girls do not seem to be affected by the use of the pacifier
The truth is that I see some gaps in this study, being one of them that the girls who use the pacifier the longest do not show differences in terms of emotional development if they compare with girls who use it less.
According to the researchers, this could be explained by the faster development of girls, who communicate before, talk before and acquire emotional tools before boys, being possible that the pacifier is not enough handicap for them.
In addition, parents could compensate for pacifier problems, because the majority of parents consider that a girl must be emotionally mature just because she is a girl. Nobody expects girls to be unmotivated, so the entrance to the world of emotions, in girls, is usually stimulated by other paths that do not have so much to do with the imitation of gestures.
However, the lack of emotions ("children do not cry") in children seems to be more accepted and no one tries to compensate for that lack of emotional world in children who use the pacifier longer.
Now, I say, what if it was the other way around? There are children with more capacity to empathize and more capacity to understand emotions, manage them and communicate with others. These children, because they are more mature and self-confident, will most likely leave the pacifier more or less early.
On the other hand, there are more insecure children, with less self-esteem and more dependents, who need external elements to calm down and calm down and who may have more trouble understanding and expressing emotions. Almost certainly these children will use the pacifier for more years.
If we take the first and the second, when they have grown, we will realize that those who seem more insecure used a pacifier longer than those who seem emotionally more stable. So what is it before, the chicken or the egg?
