Thumb Sucking - at Night Only

How hard for your child to be having this issue. My daughter got taken off the bottle too soon and still needed to suck so she figured out the fingers can't be taken away. At 31 she still has these issues. We could not afford braces because they wanted to start by breaking her jaw and totally resetting it forward and leaving her wired shut for months and months while new bone grew in to fill the gaps.

She has a recessed jaw and her teeth were nearly totally ruined. I wish I had just listened to my heart and let her stay on the bottle and then a binky if she needed it. They can be taken away much easier than fingers. I hope you find good advice here.

We bought this thumb guard to help our son. http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thumb-Sucking-Thumbusters-Pink... We tried the hard plastic kind, but htey looked like midevil torture devices and he couldn't sleep because he was uncomfortable. He could stretch the softer guard to get his thumb out, so we gave him incentive to keep it on. We told him that once he didn't need the guard any more we would buy him a set of the little legos (he had been wanting to move up from the Duplo legos :) ). The first week or so he took it off a lot. We didn't chastise or anything. We told him we knew it was a really hard habit to break, but the habit was hurting his teeth. And of course we mentioned the legos. After that first week we noticed he wasn't taking the guard off any more. So we took the guard off after 10 days and he had stopped. My BIL is our dentist. ANother trick of the trade he mentioned was putting an Ace bandage just on the elbow. It makes it uncomfortable when they try to bend their elbow to suck their thumb. Our son wore it happily, but would rip it off in his sleep no matter how we secured it, so that one didn't help us. We also tried a band aide on the thumb. My son would complain that it made his thumb sweaty and always tore it off. The thumb guard worked great, It comes in a bunch of colors, so we let him choose what color he wanted.

It sounds like your son is further along than my daughter in terms of stopping the habit. She is almost 5 and still sucks her thumb periodically throughout the day as well as at night. (Some days are worse than others.) Her dentist says we need to be sure to stop the habit before any permanent teeth come in. Her pediatrician has a very chill attitude about it. He did suggest this book, though: http://www.amazon.com/David-Decides-About-Thumbsucking-Ch...

Good luck! And I will be trying some of the other suggestions you've gotten here.

I have no idea if it's even possible to stop him while he's sleeping. I doubt it. We just accepted the reality and got braces for our son which we would have had to do anyway.

Our daughter was a major thumb sucker. We've been home for 3wks with her (adoption) and we had to stop her thumb sucking. She had major tongue thrust and couldn't swallow right, the roof of her mouth is very formed to her thumb and her front teeth are crooked. I put the thick bandaids on her thumbs, the fabric ones (the ones I had were camo, so we used those) adn put them on her at all times. I offered her a pacifier and she liked to chew on it and it seemed to help the oral fixation. Its been a week now and she doesn't need the band aids at all during the day or at naptime, only at night. She's sleeping better too because she's not slurping on her thumb all night. :)