As a parent to prepare your kids to have good oral hygiene, I’ve got a two and a half year old boy and I’ve got a six year old boy, and I can tell you that sometimes the biggest challenge is just getting them to cooperate and brush their teeth, I think probably the take-home message that I would give the parents is, is to keep up just an open.
I have open ideas about oral hygiene and do not try to stick too closely to one specific regiment. You don’t want to overdo it. I think the most important thing is just making sure that you get the kids in a good habit of brushing their teeth and making sure that their teeth are clean.
How early is early enough or what is too early as far as getting the kids to the dentist, I believe the pediatric dentistry recommendation is to get the kids to the dentist at least one time before they’re 1 year old.
I think that’s a great idea if you notice some developmental problems, particularly a cleft palate and open palate. If you look in your child’s son’s or your daughter’s mouth and realize that something just looks a little off or has some excessive bleeding, maybe you notice the teeth are not starting to erect.
You can contact a pediatric dentist anytime, but certainly, try to get in there within a year and a half. If you don’t get in within a year and a half and things look normal, there are no complaints, don’t panic.
Again. Moderation is probably the key, but you want to get your child to the dentist as soon as you can to run the first birthday ear year and a half. So what do we do at home to keep the kids interested in brushing with boys if you’ve got boys? You know that competition is always a good thing, so we try to get not to overdo it, but my goodness, who can get their teeth, brushed first and brushed correctly, we use that almost daily and that seems to get both of them hit the sink in their bathroom that they share, I think the toothbrush out and you know daddy – can be ready and then ready set.
Go that you want to be careful not to have them go so fast that they create smoke from the toothbrush and, if they’re done in 10 seconds, you don’t want that, so you have to be there to coach a little that it gets them excited.
I think I think getting kids interested in having good teeth and excited about it. Is it’s going to be half the battle? To be perfectly honest, most of the time my boys don’t want to brush their teeth, they don’t want to put the toothbrush in their mouth.
They want to fall on the floor and make a big fuss, but if you can work with that and not again not overreact, get them excited about it. We also have act Mothra’s. You can get different types of mouth rinse that have fluoride in them, which is something that they look forward to rinsing with and swishing around and spitting out.
So we say all right: you guys get to use the rinse, but you first have to brush. How long do you brush? Do you know? I think that I’ll probably rule out there that for two to three minutes I think that’s too long.
I don’t think you’re going to get your two-and-a-half-year-old to brush for three minutes. If you can put a little bit of toothpaste, fun, favorite, toothpaste, bubblegum, or great, something that tastes good to them and have them brush upward, lower right upper lower left, and then the front upper and lower.
And if you, if you can get a minute out of the deal man I’ll take it, you can get two or three minutes that’s great too, but I would definitely try to get you to know 45 seconds to a minute. Of course, that’s gonna feel like much longer when you’ve got your two-year-old, your wonder old, your three-year-old, and sometimes even with the six-year-old.
That seems like a long time, but initially, I think we started brushing around you know. Shortly after the teeth appear, you may not want to get a baby’s tooth brushing in there. You may want to get a piece of gauze.
If you’ve got guys, you can moisten the gods and when the teeth are first erupting, you can just apply a little pressure on a moist gauze and like both the teeth up, they’re, not going to get that dirty more than likely most of the material.
That’s going to collect to them is going to be bred and, of course, if you drink a lot of juice, you want to make sure to rinse that out, but for the most part, the build-up doesn’t typically start until they get into their oh, I think their Second third grade: we do have occasionally a small child that builds up tartar, but it’s very rare.
You right now are developing good habits and the good habit is to get the kid in the mindset of having fresh-smelling breath. The reasons that they want to have fresh breath and, of course, the mechanics behind learning how to use a toothbrush and electric toothbrush is fine.
You just want to make sure the batteries are working. One of the challenges can be thinking that the electric toothbrush is always going to do the job but forgetting that the batteries can wear out.
And if that’s the case, if you’re not keeping track of it, then they’re not really brushing they’re just putting something in the mouth: that’s not giving the full rotation so battery toothbrushes are great, but you’ll want to make sure they’re charged.
We use that and we also use a toothbrush. It’s really. It’s really not supposed to be complicated. Other things to keep in mind as far as all hygiene goes. I think the other important element is diet and nutrition.
We don’t want to put our kids to bed with juice. I know that there are nights, especially in the first year, when our sons were just having a hard time going to sleep water, give them water, that’s not to say once in a while.
We would give them milk or give them juice. You know again be realistic and use moderation but on a regular basis. Absolutely I think it’s a bad idea to get in the habit of giving milk or juice to go to bed with.
They will suck on that throughout the night and will create acids, forms, plaques, and assets that will eat through the child’s teeth. And it’s several times: we’ve seen children with newly developed teeth that have what we call baby bowel, carries, rotten, rotten and gum, carries food carrier hours right by the gum line, and it’s sad and it’s really a matter of using a baby bottle.
If the baby’s sick or having juice in there when they’re asleep you don’t do that milk juice in the day time. I would rush before we go to bed possession the morning when we get up, and I don’t think you need don’t do any more than that three times a day I think would be unrealistic until maybe nine maybe ten.
I would ask the pediatric dentist about that. I like sweets. You like that, I, like sweets, I’ve got a sweet tooth, my kids have sweeties, and I’m okay with that it’s important that, of course, you monitor the number of sweets that go in every parent’s going to have a different opinion of that, and I wouldn’t try To recommend what your safety zone is, but it’s not a bad thing to allow the kids to enjoy something that it’s fine every once in a while.
But having said that, it’s important that you brush afterward. Things have juices fruit, juices sedatives. If you do any service, you just want to make sure that you definitely brush as soon as you’re done with those, because those are loaded with sugar and will sit in the gum tissues in the cell caesarea of gum tissue and those are what you Put this point bit of plaque that turns into acid they can eat through the teeth.
Other than that, I think the last recommendation I would make inspires things to keep in mind, for your young kids is fluoride. It can be a controversial issue and again personally, parents are gonna have to decide what they want to do, but fluoride, I believe, was the single biggest enough invention, the right word, but the single biggest advancement that came to dentistry when it first was used in Water and they have studied what safe volumes of fluoride are in the water and it is knock out the caries rate, the decay rate in kids and adults exponentially.
I don’t know the numbers offhand, but I know that it’s it’s impressive. It is significant. It’s again a comfort zone for parents. You’ve got to be comfortable with it so researcher, but if you do research, it researches it fully a little information about what it could cause or what it does cause without knowing the whole picture.
It’s probably not helpful. It prevents tooth decay by hardening the teeth and that’s a good thing. You don’t want to drink half a gallon of fluoride every six months, but yours, your city, will not allow you to do that.
Fluoride in the water, in my opinion, is a great idea. The last thing that I would throw out there again for parents to consider is the type of dentist for your trailer, I’m a general dentist and I see children and I’m happy to see children because lots of families come here.
It’s easy for mom and dad to bring him here. It’s my personal opinion that until the age of six and certainly can go up, you know to the age of fifteen or sixteen, I think a pediatric dentist. It’s always a great idea.
Pediatric dentists are trained. Just a little bit differently than we are to handle kid issues, everything from behavior management to distractions, with toys and calling our instruments different names – we’ve become pretty good at it at distractions.
But ultimately, if I was not a dentist, I would probably take my own children to a pediatric dentist. I think it’s that worthwhile now, if your kids come here, we’re gonna take great care of them and do a great job, but I’ll also mention if there are issues that are beyond our scope, the child needs a root canal.
