Wake up Parent24, this story is old and has been commented on in the past. I have two children and they all sucked the thumb / dummy and nothing wrong with their speech. I sucked my thumb / dummy and have no speaking problems. Where a problem does come in is when the two parent's home language have different pronunciation of the same letter groupings - like in German and Afrikaans - this may cause some confusion but can be solved with a little bit of training. (My mother tongue was German, I went to an Afikaans medium school before I could hardly speak a few words Afrikaans and after matric my communication language changed to 98% English and the rest Afrikaans and a few drops of German. With our children we spoke Afrikaans and English at home and sent them to a Eglish medium school. No problems with any of our speech.) Obviously the researchers did not look into the pronunciation problems across languages because money talks - the more articles (whether substandard or not) the more money they get for their research.

Our 8 month old baby girl, started spitting her dummy out at the age of 2 months. She can't stand it. I am so happy because nothing irritates me more than a 2 year old walking around with a dummy.

My 20 month-old sucks her thumb when she's not talking away nineteen to the dozen. She is still learning to pronounce many sounds, but we haven't found any serious problems yet. My niece also sucked her thumb and has absolutely no speech impediments at all. Think this is just more fear mongering for the overly paranoid parents.

Someone wants to receive some attention in a scientific journal. Everyone in our family (young and old and very old!) sucked a dummy and no speach problems. However, there may be genetic problems and also phonetic problems. The latter may have an influence if the parents speak two different languages as their mother tongue - eg. the mom Afrikaans and the father German. The pronunciation of the same word can be different and a child may get a little confused and it causes a speech problem. My youngest daughter encountered that. I would not even take any of that research to heart - a lot of "scientific" rubbish.

So does this mean all the babies that were / are not breastfed fall prey to these results? hmmm my goodness that's a LOT of years and people affected might I add. I wish people that publish these would also balance it out, I'm a new mom and it's not always a choice to NOT breastfeed and all babies are different and this article doesn't give confidence @ all. Disappointed ;-(

If we find out the writer of the article we could accurately draw a conclusion. Because a small observational sample is an ideal basis to make inflamatory opening statements then water them down later in your article only to sum up by saying it could all be rubbish. What a waste NEWS24!!

Agreed - about the only thing you can scientifically deduce from this article is that the people who performed this "study" are of the opinion that everybody outside their immediate circle is stupid and willing to accept official-looking 'results' as facts. Oh, and you can also deduce that the architects of this study are somewhat less than intellectually gifted...

My 1 year old daughter is a thumb sucker, and I was also a thumb sucker up to the age of 8! So I find this study absolutely difficult to believe. I have never developed any speech problems and I don't see how that happens. Also, as a statistician by profession I know how biased observational studies can be, a lot of factors have to be taken into account before coming to that coclusion. This is what I would like the researchers to find out: is thumb sucking genetic?