What Sucking Habits Can Do
They affect the positions of the tongue, lips, teeth, and jaw.
If these habits continue, over time it can lead to open bite or other malocclusion.
What sucking Habits Can Do
They can cause open mouth breathing which can increase chance of airway infections, ear infections, and colds.
Our Nose has tiny hairs filtering the air we breath, when we mouth breath we loose the filtered protected air our nose hairs provide.
Because the jaw is held in an open fixture, mouth breathing can also alter normal facial growth.
What Sucking Habits Can DO
They can also affect speech development.
When a thumb, finger, or pacifier is in the mouth it changes the natural way the tongue, jaw, and lips rest.
Because of this pattern the tongue learns to rest in the wrong place and that is where the wrong speech sounds are produced.
This can lead to articulation disorders, voice disorders, mumbling speech, and lisping.
We can provide help for your child's sucking habits using methods from Unplugging the Thumb created by Sandra R. Holtzman, MS, CCC/SLP
Note that we are not saying pacifiers and thumbs are necessarily bad! We are in no way shaming mothers who are using these.
We all need a break and they are great ways to soothe our children!
Sucking while babies is natural and great for naps and soothing situations, when it becomes a problem is when the child is walking around all day sucking. They go into a trans and are more concerned with their sucking which in turn results in them communicating less with others and their surroundings. We want to cut these habits out as soon as possible so the children can interact and communicate more rather than occupy their attention with sucking.