COMFORT OBJECTS IS IT TIME TO DITCH THE BLANKY?

When and why should you say goodbye to the beloved security blanket, and how?

In 1988 Mike And The Mechanics sang, “Every generation blames the one before.” Generation Xers and Baby Boomers often feel their parents were hard disciplinarians, to blame for certain emotional deficits we sense in ourselves. After all, we feel, life is hard enough, so if a dummy brings a child some comfort, what’s the harm? But the backlash to “permissive parenting” popular today is that our parents, broadly speaking, can feel our babies are mollycoddled and overindulged, what with all that tending to them immediately when they are distressed, feeding them when they are hungry instead of on a schedule, lots of physical contact and attention, and giving them dummies and blankies to help them settle at night.

Grandparents’ derision seems to come into focus strongest when they see a dummy. Oh, how they hate them! But if an ancestor’s ever told you, “In our day we didn’t have these newfangled things,” they’re not being quite truthful. In the 1950s cartoon strip Charlie Brown, the little boy Linus is never seen without his (rather dirty) blanket, which he called his “security and happiness blanket”. True, marketers today are enjoying a boon with tagged and textured and coloured and decorated and embossed and embroidered lovies, snuggles, sleeping bags, teddies and blankies, but enterprising children have since the dawn of time been able to suck on a thumb or chew their hair or latch on to a piece of cloth their parents didn’t even know was a comfort object.

A NECESSARY COMFORT

Why do kids fall in love with their comfort objects? Researchers in a 2007 study suggest that it is common for children to imbue a treasured object with a “life force” or symbol outside of what we rationally know it has. Says study author professor Peter Hood: “If there was a machine which copied a favourite object in every way down to atomic level, we would still prefer the original. It has an essence to it. This experiment suggests this is an intuitive process. We anthropomorphise objects, look at them almost as if they have feelings. The children know these objects are not alive but they believe in them as if they are.” So widespread is this need that up to 70 percent of Western children, who usually sleep alone in their rooms, form attachments to comfort objects.

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THE COMFORT OBJECT IS THE FIRST ‘NOT-ME’

paediatrician Donald Winnicott first used the term “transitional object” in an academic context in 1962, when he theorised that children use these objects to help them when they begin to realise, around the age of eight months or so, that they are separate beings from their mothers and also that they are dependent on others for care. Before this, Winnicott says, infants can feel all-powerful; when they cry, their needs are met – they therefore think their thoughts and wishes “control” the mother. But eventually they need to feel the frustration, and anxiety, and loneliness, and other pains of separation. The comfort object is the first “not-me”, which belongs to the child and is still under the control of the child. So it plays an important role in helping the child manage this maturing and separation. Researchers led by Richard Passman in the US found that security blankets had a host of emotional benefits for the children using them: they helped children adapt to new situations, aided in their learning, and helped them when being evaluated by doctors and psychologists.

If your child is holding on to a comfort object, feel reassured: your clever offspring is making his or her way through the appropriate developmental stages, and is enterprising and creative enough to seek a salve for his emotions. Good for him!