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 dentist-ed In Your Debt!
Like, do you have ANY IDEA of the squeamish difficulties of being a Marketing/PR-Chump for Dentistry? Of pitching that bullshit to anyone younger than, say, 50?
Dentistry, and the medical practices surrounding it, have undergone one hell of a history. Like, one semi-regular convo topic amongst my various friends-groups is time travel. Of visiting historical periods past and future. Of experiencing History's Greatest Hits. The cry goes up: "What historical era would you most adore living in? Which era is your favourite? Which past era feels most homely?"
My answer seldom varies:
"Living in past eras? Are you NUTS? Don't mistake me: I'd love to merely visit. See the sights. Meet the locals. Soak up the ambience 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 protofoetuses do NOT know how good we've got it. As kids, we all hated dentists, right? We loathed their injections and drillings and related tortures, yeah? Both unbearably agonising and apparently pointless. But our parents seemed dismayingly deaf to our nascent pleas. And child-me could never understand why.
Now I can. Dear god. Kiddy dental agonies of past decades were worse. In my country of New Zealand, starting in the 1920s, its primary schools came funded and replete with dental clinics. My parents tell me kids nicknamed them "The Murder House". Its dental drills were foot-cranked. They lacked anaesthetics. Its progenitor, New Zealand's then-Education Minster, James Parr, also encouraged these dental nurses to shoot disobedient schoolchildren like they were executing traitorous horses. And bray horrid halitosis-y laughter in the kiddies' faces as they perished.
Again, this remained within the realm of contemporary societal norms. For I know we all like to sneer at so many now-elderly Boomers for their one-dimensional dismissiveness of Kids These Days ... but honestly, I think here they have a point. Boomers' formative dentistry experiences proved oodles more brutal than the relatively milquetoast shenanigans fondling us youngsters today.
So why didn't their own parents shield them from all this hideous mouthy brutality?
Because tectonic Murder House hand-drills-ies were themselves a ginormous leap forward over what they superseded. The pre-Boomer dental norm was simply to get their teeth pulled out with pliers. Then dentures. Sometimes when as young as 19. Again: this was normal. This was mundane. George Washington famously had a set of dentures. Historically, many/most people got their teeth removed in their youth and nobody batted an eyelid.
You reckon you mightn't? 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 privilege of modern dental practices. Most historical peeps did not. A tooth abscess can kill you.
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 antique climes? Hell yeah. Vacation thither? Count me in d00d!
But actually live there? No disrespect intended, honest, but fuck right off with that bullshit.
But! (Brief tangent, bear with me): All this is just one reason I've deliberately softened and backtracked my once-pseudoStalinist stance on religion and blind dogmatic faith. Remember mid-late-2000s Internet culture? Those wacky-ol' New Atheists, eh? Dawkins and his ilk? Geez. 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 stands even taller than me. It's because I suspect if present-moi ever directly beheld Dawkins-esque-moi, I'd likely deem him a smarmy and patronising prick.
Because 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. Should they confront or hassle me about their own dogmas, or if 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.
Tangent concluded. Just one night of toothache floored me. A lifetime of toothache? Holy friggin' shit.
The social norm of tooth removal and replacement with dentures has almost vanished from living memory. Den
Oh, loads of ways. Ask an economist any question whatsoever about economics, and their answer will inevitably rest on a foundation of Supply and Demand. It's always Supply and Demand.
Similar story with disincentivising anyone from any action whatsoever. Carrot and Stick. It's always Carrot and Stick.
All you must 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.
Kick off by embellishing the ol' classics. The standard thumb-suck dissuasion tactics are: (1) modernity is already callous enough towards our tooth health and physical alignment, and unrelenting thumb-sucking just messes these up further; and (2) thumb-sucking is hideously uncool.
Re dentistry versus modernity: even the most recent few centuries have seen vast changes in food prep and tooth erosion. Consider this QI-bit on Richard III's overbite. Unlike us modern-day harlots, ol' Rick didn't have one. His 1300s-era diet and cutlery norms required him and his cronies to physically gnaw bite-sized food chunks from his meals.
The standard approach is to disincentivise nephews worldwide from
Could you not behead him? It's a tad difficult to suck on something when you don't have a mouth. Then again, if he's that tenacious, I'm sure he'd figure out a way to apply suction from one or more of his remaining orifices. You'll have to amputate 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,
Original: https://mikeyclarke.co.nz/blog/2022/11/how-to-stop...