All this discussion of thumb sucking makes me want to ask if anyone saw the
"Hers" piece in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago "Creature
comfort" (Nov. 5)?  I've missed a lot of lactnet lately, maybe the article
started this discussion?

I also missed the NYTimes piece, but it was apparently about a mother's
gentle response to her child's thumb sucking -- three letters to the editor
in this past week's NY Times Magazine refer back to that article, all
supporting the thumb sucker-- two of the three were from adults who still
found comfort in their thumbs-- and were not ashamed to sign their names.

One writes:

"What brings comfort, costs nothing, doesn't enebriate or cause cancer, has
no calories and is as handy as your thumb? Your thumb, of course. And yet
what is it that society ridicules more than drunks, cigarette smokers and
obsessive eaters? Thumb-suckers."  This author describes herself as "a
40-year old professional who still enjoys the pleasures of thumb-sucking
after a hard day."

Another strikes the same theme--

"As an adult, I've relied on all kinds of stress-reducing activities, from
running to yoga to drugs, but none compares to the utter peace of simply
sucking that thumb-- and none are as benign (not to mention cheap)."

A third writer wonders why a child's need for oral gratification elicits such
negative response compared to other non-oral comfort tools such as teddy
bears and blankets.  She says, "We want children off the bottle, off the
pacifier, off the thumb, all by age 2. Then we sit around mourning the loss
of their babyhood."

(Breastfeeding was not mentioned.)

Tina Smillie,
who as a child sucked on her upper arm in the privacy of her own bed (and
always wondered why) but in public simply chewed the ends off of pens; and
who tried, at age 11, to use a pacifier because she was destroying too many
pens (and getting ink in her mouth), but found the pacifier nipple annoyingly
too small; the thumb would have been a logical solution, had it not been so
unthinkable to that oldest child....
Since reading those NYT letters I actually gave thumb sucking a try-- it does
feel good, but too unfamiliar to take up after all these years. Try it.
(I have visions of dozens of women, and a few men, all over the world,
sitting in front of computer screens, each with thumb tentatively in
mouth....)