8: "Although I'd like my daughter to suck less--"

"--especially since it seems so filthy when she's digging in the garden/at the zoo or whatever and then puts the old thumb in, I believe I should in fact protect her right to this mildly deviant but fundamentally not that terrible habit."--Carol Conell, Reed College, Portland, OR.

"You were three years old and a chronic thumbsucker, and we took you sailing, and your chubby little arms just barely poked out of your lifejacket. When you realized that your thumb couldn't get any closer than four inches from your mouth--" [imitation of thumb's failure to reach mouth] "--you sat down and started crying and you wouldn't stop until we took the jacket off back on the shore." --Ellen Colwell, Colwell Residence, Portland, OR.

That's right--my partner Margarethe and I evaluated a support group for parents of thumb-sucking youth, or "suckers" (their words, not ours). We applied Braithwaite's scheme to the 20 messages in the thread, deciding whether or not to apply the following labels to each response to the original post: Information, Tangible Assistance, Esteem Support, Network Support, Emotional Support, and Humor. Our results:

The Quick Run-Down:

Information. This group seemed like it was primarily a device for other suckers' parents to give advice to the poster. As such, all the messages were informational. (One guy just quoted Dr. J. Brown: "Orthodontia is cheaper than therapy.") On top of advice, the parents appeared to love telling stories about their own kids (see E. Colwell, above), most of which were relevant. It should be noted that this was a far higher percentage than Braithwaite found.

Tangible Assistance. Seriously? Between strangers, on the Wild Wild World Wide Web? Parents whose biggest issue is that their kids keep their thumbs out of their mouths aren't begging for money or any other tangibles, and Original Poster Penny Ginn wasn't offered any.

Esteem Support. This wasn't exactly what Penny was looking for either, and the responses seemed to acknowledge that. No one was saying "your child sucks her thumb, so you're a bad mother"--who knows why children do it, aside from the obvious, immediate benefits of the warm sensation, the interesting taste, the instant sense of security, and the never having to deal with an itchy palate. However, several messages contained stories where parents defended their own esteem, which we felt was aimed at the OP as well.

Network Support. Again, this was a forum for people to share their own experiences and then interpret them--OP Penny didn't need connections to other people who might have knowledge about clinical thumb-sucking disorder. The Amateurs-R-Us, no-credentials-necessary game of thumb-sucker supporting involves no experts or second-uncles-you-should-talk-to. Under the assumptions that the replyers weren't themselves network support and that Dr. J. Brown didn't count, we found no network support messages.

Humor. We were very satisfied with our reading material--fun to read and full of laughs. Suckers seem to be a light enough topic that humor is an appropriate aspect of their description, especially the parents who trust the Internet to forgive them for the awful lies they've told their own children ("what happened to Grandpa's [missing] thumb, Mommy?"). Some posters took themselves completely seriously and didn't even pretend to find any humor in sucking, but we found that half of them had at least one humorous statement in their message.

So why don't our numbers match Braithwaite's? Again, it's the nature of the subject, and probably partly the online environment. This topic in "misc.kids" wasn't a forum of close-knit thumb combat veterans--it was just a bunch of strangers throwing stories around about a "mildly deviant habit." Those restrictions, cutting out any serious, heavy topics and any non-strangers who might feel more comfortable offering network support or tangible assistance, lead Margarethe and to I believe that if Braithwaite had studied only suckers, the results would have mirrored ours closely. And maybe it would have shed some extra light on this most grave of childhood afflictions. After all, there's one born every minute.

--Ken Colwell, Margarethe van der Tuin