Kevin Baldeosingh
My daughter Jinaki recently started sucking her fingers.
“Are they tasting good?” I ask her.
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You need any salt to go with them?”
“No, Daddy.”
Now this is a three-year-old girl who, as a baby, sucked her thumb for exactly one week. At that time, her mother and me made little effort to stop her, since our plan was to take action only when her teeth started to come out. But she pretty much stopped for herself. Her brother Kyle, who is 14 months old, has never even tried to suck his thumb.
As parents, we may have been lucky in this respect (one less challenge to deal with) but the reason we had also read that thumb sucking was babies’ method of self-comfort, and so decided not to interfere until teething became an issue.
Our assumption is that neither child has sucked thumb because we had also taken a decision that, until they were at least three years old, we would protect them from stress—ie do what Trinidadians call “spoil them.” Primarily, that meant picking them up as soon as they cried, no matter what they were crying for. This meant neither Kyle nor Jinaki ever had cause for self-comfort since someone was always around to do so, including their grandmother who was always telling us to not give them too much “hand.”
Now I’m not saying that thumb-sucking is a child’s first addiction. But stress is a key factor in whether people become addicted to drugs or not, though it is not necessarily a factor which decides if a person experiments with marijuana or cocaine or other narcotics.
There is also a genetic variable. A study done in Sweden looked at alcoholism rates in adopted children, and found that, when the adoptive father was alcoholic, about 17 per cent of the children grew up to be alcoholics. But, of the adoptees brought up in a home free of parental alcoholism, 18 per cent of the children whose biological father was alcoholic also became alcoholics.
What this shows is that genes are a better predictor of alcoholism than the home environment. But it must also be noted that, in both scenarios, a minority of children became addicts. Neither me nor my wife smoke and we drink very moderately so, from a genetic viewpoint, I can be fairly confident my own children won’t become substance addicts.
On the other hand, we both have a certain degree of obsessive compulsive behaviour (or, if you want to put a positive spin on it, commitment and concentration), which can be self-destructive if the children get obsessed by the wrong kind of activities. And both my children seem to already have this tendency: as a two-year-old, Jinaki carried a toy spoon to kindergarten every day; Kyle similarly insists on holding plastic bottle caps.
However, psychologist Gene M Heyman in his book Addiction: A Disorder of Choice points out that “a genetic basis for addiction does not automatically mean that addicts are ‘compulsory, involuntary’ drugs users. Put more generally, if a key feature of a disease state is that the symptoms are involuntary, then we need to know how to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary behaviour.”
Most importantly, if your child as a teenager or young adult does start drinking or using other drugs, you should certainly do what you can to make them stop and there are many effective strategies for doing so (none of which includes licks). But you shouldn’t panic.
“What research shows is that everyone, including those who are called addicts, stops using drugs when the costs of continuing become too great,” says Heyman. The main “costs” that make addicts quit are financial concerns, fear of arrest: and, especially, becoming a parent.
