Toothbrushes and other objects

My daughter went to sleep just now in the pushchair, clutching a tub of rice pudding and a teaspoon. Two nights ago, she fell asleep in our bed with a bottle of calpol in one hand, and a plastic medicine spoon in the other, and now she won’t go anywhere without her toothbrush, and if she can get away with it, her sister’s too. Why this need to have something to hold in her hands? Paediatricians and psychologists talk about a child’s need for a “transitional object” – usually something soft and cuddly, like a bear or blanket, from which the child receives comfort and companionship as they are learning to become more independent from their parents. It’s an almost exclusively Western phenomenon, a fact attributed to our habit of pushing our children towards independence early, keeping them at arm’s length in cots and pushchairs, and having them sleep in separate rooms from a very early age. In other cultures, where children are carried in slings, and sleep in a shared bed with their parents and siblings, such objects are not common.

All this makes sense, and I remember quite clearly when my older daughter started to become very much attached to her favourite bunny, the now much-loved and rather scruffy looking “Floppy”: it was when she was 3 and a half, and I moved her into her own bed because I was pregnant again and fed up of being kicked by a long-legged child turning through 90 degrees every night. She occasionally favours another soft toy, of which she has many, but basically Floppy is her constant companion; he/she comes in the car with us, sits on the sofa to watch TV with us, and even sits at the kitchen table sometimes to eat a pretend supper with us.

Her younger sister, now 21 months old, will occasionally give a soft toy a perfunctory kiss or cuddle, but she’s not really interested in them. Useful things, however, like medicine spoons, toothbrushes or pots of rice pudding, she can become utterly fixated on, to the point where removing them will cause a major tantrum. Is this behaviour coming from the same root as the need for a transitional object? Is she doing this now because she is becoming more independent anyway? She is still firmly attached to me in many ways (we are still co-sleeping and she is still breastfeeding), but she is becoming more bold in her exploration of the world, and more aware of how things affect her. She has become terrified of dogs, and when a loud aeroplane roars overhead she will cling to me, saying she is scared. Perhaps these inanimate objects allow her to feel a small amount of control over the world in which she is finding her place. Maybe I’d better stock up on a couple of spare toothbrushes in case she loses this one.