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Why parents keep quiet about dummies Child-care fashions change but guilt over using `comforters' is still powerful, write Christopher Martyn and Catharine Gale The dummy was considered germ-laden, liable to come into contact with `all sorts of unclean things' and so a source of infection
- Article from:
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The Independent - London
- Article date:
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January 17, 1995
- Author:
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Copyright informationCopyright 1995 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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You spot a friend pushing a trolley down a supermarket aisle. As
you approach, she reaches out furtively to the child riding in front
of her, and takes a dummy from its mouth. She hides it in a pocket.
Dummies make cowards of us all. They may keep our children quiet,
but we don't want to be caught using them. A dummy was the only thing
that would pacify the daughter of other friends and they let her suck
it constantly. Their embarrassment was plainly signalled by the way
they referred to the dummy as "the family shame".
The medical and nursing professions have deeply mistrusted dummies
for nearly a century. Yet they date back even longer.
In Durer's 16th-century painting of the madonna ...