Healthy teeth are often taken for granted, especially childrens teeth. We need to teach our children about oral health as soon as possible. We will therefore give you a quick rundown on how to best keep your children’s teeth healthy and how to do it easily. Considering the cost of dental care, teaching good dental care should be a priority for all parents.
It sometime feels like a lost battle, since even fruit can be harmful to your teeth. But if we teach our children to care for their teeth, you will avoid many of the problems that might arise. Even baby teeth need to be cared for properly, so introduce good routines early on.
First teeth
Your baby’s first teeth appear around six months of age, but they have been developing in the jawbones since your fifth or sixth week of pregnancy. By age two-and-a-half or three your child will probably have the full set of primary teeth, also called milk teeth.
Dental health practitioners advice parents to start cleaning their babies teeth as soon as they appear. Rub teeth and gums gently with a wet piece of cotton or gauze, don’t use toothpaste until your child is two years old.
The first teeth are more important than most of us give them credit for. They are the guides for the permanent teeth and keep the space free for when they come out. Loosing teeth to teeth decay or an accident might cause the permanent teeth to grow out crooked and also lead to bite problems.
Routine
Brushing their teeth should be part of any child’s morning and sleep routine, and therefore done twice a day, after breakfast and before going to bed. Fun coloured toothbrushes with images might be great for older kids, but at the end of the day brush is just a tool not a toy or accessory. Just being able to choose colour might be enough for any child and better yet brushing their teeth at the same time as you. It is not only more enjoyable, but you can also guide them and encourage them to brush the full three minutes advices. Not a bad routine for most of us, who probably seldom do the full three minutes.
Children should always use a small and soft brush, to reach all the teeth and avoid damaging or moving the gums. Tattered bristles on a toothbrush are an indication it’s time to change, otherwise every three months is good enough. According to the Dental Health Foundation there is no evidence that electrical toothbrushes are more effective than manual ones.
As a safety precaution teach your child to stay in the bathroom while brushing their teeth, a fall or a bump can easily push the brush forcefully into the back of their mouth and hurt or damage their throat.
Toothpaste and gels
Always buy toothpaste with fluoride, which helps teeth repair any damage done to the enamel. Many homeopathic alternatives might not have fluoride and toothpastes for children might have lower levels.
Flourides are a concern to many parents, especially since Irish public water and many group schemes is fluoridated. According to the Dental Health Foundation and Irish Dental Association an excess of fluorides may cause dental fluorosis, which is purely a cosmetic condition, white stains on the teeth, often only detected by dentists.
Be careful with abrasive and whitening agents in toothpaste, there are no regulations in Ireland to ensure that they have the right levels which might not be adequate for children‘s teeth.
Sugar, sugar, sugar…
Nobody needs to tell a parent that sugar is unhealthy, in the ideal world we would never let anything sweet pass into our children’s mouth. An almost impossible achievement for most parents, even if you might maintain a hard line there will always be others working against you.
Sugar is broken down in the mouth by natural bacteria and turns into acid that weakens the teeth’s enamel and protection. A can of coke contains about seven teaspoons of sugar, it is also a very acidic drink. If you leave a milk tooth in a glass of coke over night, the acid will have dissolved it by morning. Not surprisingly coke can be used for cleaning silver and brass.
It is true that children are not born craving sweets, as parents we are most often the culprit of introducing them into their diets when fruit would have made them just as happy, If you have already a sugar junky on your hands you can protect his teeth by limit the intake of treats to after meals. You will then not only give your child an incentive to finish their food, but also avoid a constant snacking. It is not the amount of sugar that causes dental decay, but the number of times you eat a sugary treat.
Dental practitioners advice parents to limit the amount of snacks and sugary drinks a child has throughout the day, even healthy snacks and fruit juices. Try to get your child to drink a bit of water after any sugary treat he might have, that way washing away a bit of the sugar that might stay in the mouth.
If you are battling your child’s sugar intake the best guideline is to taste what they eat. If it’s sweet it will have some kind of sugar, natural or added. Don’t be duped by product labels of “sugarless”, “sugar free” and “no added sugar”, which might only mean that the producer hasn’t added any sucrose. Watch out for other sugars such as fructose, maltose, dextrose, glucose syrup, molasses, treacle, maltodextrins, maple syrup and honey.
Bottle feeding
More ways of protecting your child’s teeth is to introduce a cup as soon as possible. Drinking sweetened drinks from a bottle leaves the liquid longer in the mouth and exposes the teeth to more sugar than from a cup. As a first step with sugary drinks and juices, don’t make them to you own taste but dilute, dilute, dilute.
Dentists also recommend that we avoid letting our child use the bottle as a soother or put him to bed with it. This includes bottles of formula, milk or sweetened drinks, but not plain water. As a parent the bottle seems the best solution for getting your child to sleep and an impossible pattern to break. Why would you if it means that they’ll actually sleep? We tend to get stuck in patterns and ways of getting our children to sleep, but they are not impossible to break. It might go surprisingly painless, but for your own benefit plan ahead and choose a moment where you have the energy to handle adversity, push yourself a day more and don’t feel bad about giving up if it’s driving you insane.
First visit to the dentist
A visit to the dentist is something that most of us put off, if it isn’t the cost or fear, it is just the low priority our dental health has for most of us. According to the Irish Dental Association three quarter of the population prefer to suffer toothache than visit the dentist.
Most dental practitioners will recommend that you bring your child for their first visit at the age of one for a routine check. The dentist might detect any early signs of tooth decay, but the main purpose is to make the child comfortable visiting the dentist. In reality most of us might not have the time, money or inclination for such a visit, but you should try not to pass on any of your own anxieties or fears of the dentist
Tips for teeth brushing
· Use a small and soft toothbrush.
· Supervise the brushing until your child is seven.
· Brush softly and methodically, try to reach all parts of the teeth
· A pea size of toothpaste is enough
· It should take about three minutes
For more information see:
www.dentist.ie
Water and formula
It is recommended that when possible use tap water when making baby bottles. The fluoridated water will protect your baby’s developing teeth. Bottled water has high quantities of sodium (salt) that could be harmful to your baby, particularly the kidneys. If your tap water is not suitable for drinking, compare the sodium levels of different bottled waters. Expensive water isn’t automatically better.
Do you have any great tips to share?