Try to use several different colors and shapes of pacifiers to comfort your child. In addition to the fact that pacifiers provide your infant with something to suck on, they are also one of your child’s most familiar toys. If you change pacifiers several times a day, the toy will become less familiar. In this fashion, it may well be easier to wean your child off of the pacifier when the time comes.
When your child is about six months old (or whenever your child can grasp items and eat small amounts of solid food)
At this stage in development, it is common for children to remove their pacifiers so that they can look at them or bang them around like any other toy. The pacifier looses a bit of its status at this point because there are other things to play with. Be on the lookout. If your child drops his or her pacifier, replace it quickly with another small toy. Keep rotating different toys into your replacement cycle. At first, your child will be upset when the pacifier falls out. However, they will learn over time to bond with some of the other toys that they get when the pacifier falls out. Patience is the key. Try to rotate in several toys before you cave in and give the pacifier back.
By six months, the only time when the pacifier will have an advantage over other toys is at nap or bedtime. It is probably unwise to try to take the previous pacifier away when your child goes to sleep. However, make sure that you do not put the pacifier back in if it falls out during a nap. Your child will sleep better anyway if she can learn to find and replace the pacifier on her own.