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How to get my teenage nephew to stop sucking his thumb?
I’m reading all the comments to him btw, no need to censor he’s got a potty mouth.
Yes he knows it’s satire, but he finds this group hilarious !
Paige! Girl! You've just unearthed the opportunity of a lifetime! Play your cards right, and you might just place every dentist who'd ever dentisted In Your Debt!
Bit of a natter ahead. It involves dentistry, its recent centuries of history, and the difficulties of marketing it. Pour yourself a Rosé or similar. I'll wait.
Happily Rosé'd, sugah? Fab. Let's kick off:
Okay. Do you have ANY IDEA of the squeamish difficulties of PR-Chump-ing for Dentistry? Of marketing that agonising bullshit to anyone younger than, say, 50?
Dentistry and its medical practices have undergone one hell of a history. A semi-regular convo topic amongst my various friends-groups is time travel. Of venturing to eras past and future. Of experiencing History's Greatest Hits. The cry goes up: "What period in history would you most adore living in?"
My answer seldom varies:
"Living in past eras? Are you NUTS? Don't mistake me; I'd love to visit. See the sights. Meet the locals. Soak up the antiquity and the glory. Witness history unfold. But then! Return to the present post-haste."
Modern dentistry alone. That's sufficient reason to remain right here in the Now.
Shit, man. Us postmodern protoembryos do NOT know how good we've got it, teeth-wise. I mean sure: as kids, we all hated dentist visits, right? We loathed their injections and drillings and associated tortures. Unbearable agony, and to our juvenile eyes and minds, utterly friggin' pointless.
But our parents seemed dismayingly deaf to our nascent pleas. And child-me could never understand why.
Now I can. Good lord.
- I've witnessed what actually happens when kids neglect dental hygiene, and therefore why parents remain such adamant sticklers about tooth-brushing and dental surgery; and:
- The dental agonies of past decades were SO much WORSE. Today's dentistry is basically Disneyland.
From the 1920s onward, my country of New Zealand decided the nation's children deserved top-notch dental care, and rolled out nationwide on-site dental clinics at all primary schools. My parents tell me kids nicknamed them "Murder Houses". As far as the kids were concerned, these Murder Houses were horrific Thunderdomes of mouthy pain and suffering. Its dental drills were foot-cranked. They performed surgeries without anaesthetics. Their progenitor, New Zealand's Education Minster James Parr, also loudly encouraged Murder House dental nurses to shoot disobedient children like they were executing treasonous horses. And bray laughter, horrid and halitosis-y, in the kiddies' faces as they perished.
Again, all this bullshit actually seldom ventured broader than contemporary societal norms. Life back then was proper tough. I know we all savour sneering at Boomers for their own one-dimensional sneering at Kids These Days ... but honestly? Here, I think they have a point. Boomers' formative dentistry experiences proved oodles more brutal than the relatively milquetoast shenanigans us youngsters ever faced.
So if this kiddie Boomer dentistry was so brutal, why didn't their own parents shield them from it?
Because hideous Murder House hand-drills-ies, dreadful as they were, were themselves a quantum leap beyond what they superseded. Get this: the pre-Boomer dental norm was simply to get their teeth wrenched out with pliers. Then wear dentures forever. Sometimes when as young as 19. Again: this was normal. This was mundane. George Washington famously had a set of spring-loaded dentures. They kept jamming at inopportune moments. Historically, many/most people got their teeth yanked out in their youth, and nobody batted an eyelid.
Run your tongue along your own beloved teeth. Go on. Right now. Now picture being held down by 29 strapping medical assistants, and your trusty local dentist wrenching all your darling gnashers, one by one. Would you ever volunteer yourself for that? You reckon you wouldn't? Yeah? Ever had toothache? I have. Exactly once. Holy shit. The pain was unbelievable. Next day at dawn: dentist appointment pronto; drill baby drill; cracked and rotting wisdom tooth outta here.
You and I enjoy the extraordinary privileges of modern dental practices. Most historical peeps did not. A tooth abscess can kill you. It's vicious steel pliers or nothing, baby.
So whenever a well-meaning but oblivious buddy suggests giving the ol' Time Machine a permanent whirl back to medieval times, I'm quick to remind them that modern dentistry ALONE is sufficient cause to remain living in the good ol' PRESENT.
Visit? Hell yeah. Vacation thither? Count me in d00d! But actually live there? No disrespect intended, honest, but urinate right off with that bullshit.
But! (Brief sub-tangent-within-this-dentist-tangent, soz lol, but bear with me): All this is just one reason I've deliberately softened and backtracked my once-pseudoStalinist stance on religion, and on blind dogmatic faith. Remember mid-2000s Internet culture? Those wacky-ol' New Atheists? Dawkins-and-chums? That shite peaked right as your humble correspondent was coming of age. And good gumdrops I'd bellyflopped the lot.
My home library still rocks my copies of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great. But I've not read them in years. And not merely because my current To-Read book stack looms even taller than me. No, if present-moi ever directly accosted Dawkinsesque-past-moi, I'd likely deem him a patronising prick.
It's only in subsequent years that I've soaked up many, many personal histories and tales, past and present. It's only relatively recently I've absorbed the morbid truth that holy shit the world is so often crammed with pain and suffering and unrelenting agony. These days, I don't begrudge anyone clinging to any and every scrap of solace and comfort they can. Might their beliefs remain deluded? Oh sure. I suppose so. Might they confront or hassle me about their own dogmas? Should they attempt to bend all society to these dogmas? Then Holy Shit We Have A Mutha-Flippin' Problem.
But should they adopt a demonstrably false and/or bullshit belief that nonetheless grants them graceful panacea, and they molest no others? Then ... you know what? I'll firmly yet respectfully disagree, but otherwise leave them be. We all need a smidgeon of solace. Sub-tangent concluded.
Just one night of toothache floored me. A lifetime of toothache? Holy friggin' shit.
Until a few decades ago, everything I'd just typed was common knowledge. But as the years advance and generations refresh, an ever-greater proportion of society thrive knowing only the slightly agonising dentistry of modernity. They know zilch of either the brutal dental practices of antiquity, or the even-brutal-er consequences of forgoing this. They're numpties. The tiniest tickle from one of today's zillion-RPM dental drills, and you have to unpeel today's youngsters from the friggin' ceiling.
This is the environment faced by Dentistry PR Chumps. How can they market and sell indispensable dental agonies to generations aware of neglecting these only via third-hand history lessons?
And here, Paige, is where your thumb-sucker nephew comes in.
Chronic thumb-sucking messes up your teeth.
So my first draft of this article involved Deterrence. I initially figured we might have a bit of fun with ol' Nephew-boy. All we'd need to do is make your nephew associate sucking his thumb with unrelenting agony and torment, and associate refraining from sucking his thumb with exquisite, ecstatic pleasure. Widen the gap between these into a vast and unbridgeable chasm.
How? Duh. Revert to the Classics. Booby-trap his thumb. Sneak into his bedroom whilst he slumbers and soak the offending digit in seemly fragrances of thioacetone. It'll perfume-up his bullshit for months. Either that or wire tremendous quantities of plastic explosives to his thumb, in broad daylight, with his full knowledge, with the explosives-trigger atop his thumbnail, and then command him to thumbly feast to his heart's content, mwa ha ha.
If thumb sabotage just ain't to your tastes, then could you not behead him? It's a tad difficult to suck on something when absent a mouth. Then again, if he's that tenacious, I'm sure he'd figure out how to apply thumb-suction from one or more of his remaining orifices. You'll have to behead those too.*
That said, maybe we've got him all wrong! I've been assuming all along that his thumb-suck motivation are simple pleasure. Maybe it's pain. Maybe it's self-flagellation. Maybe he's a member of that wacky religious cult in The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei, of which I've spoken in other articles. Maybe he just needs a cheeky pep-talk. He'll be right as rain again.
But! On further reflection! On the topic of discouraging thumb-sucking? I've pondered further. And nah. I've changed my mind utterly. I'm now thinking the opposite. I'm thinking that your nephew should heighten his thumb-suck predelictions to the point of mangling his adult-teeth. We're talking Olympic training sessions. We're talking thumb suckage so grandiose, so magnificent, with such stupendous and prolonged PSI-ing, that it'll rearrange his teeth and jaw and lower skull into something resembling a Saarlac Pit from Return Of The Jedi. He can digest and swallow tractors. He can bite lions asunder. Conifers fear him. Godzilla flees. King Kong routs. He's unstoppable.
And then? Mr. Nephew should approach these Dentistry PR Chumps, with an offer and and opportunity of a lifetime.
For said Dentistry PR Chumps have undergone year after year of nervous breakdowns, haven't they. They simply can't market dentistry to today's youth. It's just too hideous. Their only exemplars of tooth decay and dental Armageddon reside in dusty grubby textbooks. These otherwise intrepid ad-men have nothing. Oh sure, you get kids needing a few fillings. But nothing compared to the hideous toothy horrors of antiquity. Scoffs of "whatever grandad" therefore explode from neon-smiley youth clubs worldwide. For the Chumps have met their sales/marketing match.
Until now.
Your nephew approaches the Dentistry PR Chumps, resplendent with a bitey hurricane. Slurring a tad, he volunteers his esteemed and venerable services as a hand-picked Dentistry Disaster Story. And the Dentistry PR Chumps have their perfect ad-fodder dental disastergeddon at last.
Just imagine. World tooth-tours. He'll blunder into unwitting classrooms as a hilarious Thumb Monster and terrify the kiddies into leaving their thumbs in solitude and perhaps slay the eight weakest. And scare the survivors into dang well brushing their teeth! He'll be the mightiest Dentist Hero of the century! Frazzled parents worldwide will sing his praises! He'll be a kind of Anti-Wiggles.
Might your nephew balk at wrecking his teeth and throat for a quick billion-bucks? Maybe. Though I'd counter with a quotation from a certain Marty Feldman, a comedian in the '60s-'80s, with spectacularly wonky eyes:
“If I aspired to be Robert Redford, I’d have my eyes straightened and my nose fixed and end up like every other lousy actor, with two lines on Kojak. But this way I’m a novelty.”
Feldman's eccentric look Made His Career. And so might your nephew's. Pay the fellow handsomely enough, and he'll happily remain match-fit and Enemy Of Thumbs for the rest of his lucrative life. So wear thimbles. And top up your rosé. You've earned it.
*Aah. I've genuinely grossed myself out with that.