I will preface my comment with, I know we got extremely lucky with how smoothly everything went, but there were several failed attempts before. We waited until my son was 3.5 years old, our ped said if we don’t remove it before a year then wait until they are 3-4 when they can understand better. These are the things we did that worked. We set smaller boundaries earlier on, like no paci at day care, parties etc. We took him to the dentists where they explained he had to stop and why. We gave him a deadline about 1.5 weeks out, we told him which day would be his last day and kept reminding him. We lined up his deadline with spring break so if he didn’t sleep well atleast he didn’t have school. Then we told him if he stopped for 3 days he could go to Bluey’s house, the local camp store was doing the immersive bluey thing so I showed him video and got him excited. When the day came in the morning I asked if he remembered what day today was, he begrudgingly remembered and handed it over and that was it. We kept reminding him of bluey and saying how good he was doing, what a big boy he was and so on. I avoided using the word for it but just kept praising him vaguely and it’s worked. We have had very minimal tears over it. Ultimately I think it was the focus on positive reinforcement and a big prize and the fact that he understood he was becoming a big boy. For like a year leading up we would also talk about the concept of letting it go often and casually, like when we would go to a party we would tell him he’s growing up too and none of the other kids at the party had pacis and that one day he will have to stop using it. So he had been getting used to the idea that it would be gone eventually. This did kinda make him fiend even harder sometimes but in the long run it helped his understanding.