Baby Pacifier
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New parents go through a wide range of emotions. The joy of a new baby in the house is a singular excitement that is unmatched by any other feeling in life. At the same time, a sense of worry and anxiety about whether you are ready to be parents and if you have bought all the right stuff for the baby is a constant and nagging feeling in the back of your mind that never really goes away. Combine that level of concern with the nonstop work that goes into caring for a newborn and the life of a mom and dad of an infant becomes one of the constant exhilaration of a new life in the house combined with an almost debilitating worry about the safety of that youngster.
One of the issues that young parents worry about as much as anything is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which strikes without warning and without explanation. Many parents get so worried about SIDS that they take actions such as installing monitors so they can listen to baby breathe all night long or sleeping with the baby so you are always there should she stop breathing.
It would be nice if SIDS were one of those internet hoaxes that we could just disregard. But sadly, SIDS is real and because there is no diagnosis on what causes the syndrome, it makes all parents worry about this sudden tragedy striking their home. Medical science is working feverishly to try to diagnose this problem. During that research, something interesting and comforting has come up. This discovery gives parents something they can do that is not expensive but that has been proven to provide some hedge of protection to the child against SIDS.
What science has discovered is that infants who start using a pacifier early in their infancy and continue to use it until they are past the age where SIDS is a threat exhibit a lower level of threat from the syndrome. Medical science is not sure why this is but the research data is definitive that the thing you no doubt were already thinking about doing which is introducing your infant to a pacifier is actually a powerful weapon against SIDS.
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At this point doctors have few guidelines except to start the baby on the pacifier as soon as she is ready to accept it. For nursing babies, it might take a month or so before the sucking instinct is ready to go. For bottle babies, you can introduce the pacifier virtually right away. But this is encouraging news because a pacifier is easy to use, inexpensive and good for the baby in many ways. Now we know that it may actually be able to save her life. What a wonderful job for the simple baby pacifier that you already had come to depend on.
