Eli: Hard habit to break

Eli has a habit that dates back to when he was 3 months old. That's longer than wearing diapers or eating baby food. It's him sucking his two fingers.

We tried sometime last year to get him to stop. The ped said that the only thing that would really nip the habit in the bud was peer pressure, when he ends up at school and other kids make fun of him for doing it. Barring that, the best way was positive reinforcement, some kind of reward for every time he tells us or we notice that he's NOT sucking his fingers. We opted for stickers and it was curbing his habit for a couple of days. But at the moment I started slowing down with the stickers, the habit came back, almost more fiercely than before.

So we haven't really been on top of him since then. I'll call out the occasional "Fingers!" which works 80% of the time, for about 1 minute. We'll give occasional warnings about crooked teeth and how braces hurt. But we haven't gotten serious about curbing the habit.

And not that we are now either. But this afternoon, Tom did tell Eli that if he sucks his fingers while watching Tom and Tobey play Portal, one of his FAVORITE things to watch, then he will not be able to watch the rest of the time. He sucked. He was forced to leave. He cried.

And tonight, after Tom put him down to bed, a favorite finger sucking time, Eli comes downstairs rather concerned/almost upset. He said, in the cutest of 4 year old voices:

Mommy, I can't suck my fingers or I can't play Portal. But I can't hold it for so long!

I smiled sympathetically and giggled inside at how darned cute he was for trying so hard not to suck his fingers. I told him how I used to suck my thumb and my mom told me I could stop the habit myself. And I promised to make him a sticker chart tomorrow (previously we had just given him a sticker to stick on himself, but no chart to track progress) so we can try to track how well he does at not sucking his fingers. And I told him how I know he can stop sucking his fingers.

But most of all, I was just impressed how my 4 year old could express himself, fingers or not.