Kids' teeth are temporary right? So they don’t need care or maintenance, right? It seems ridiculous but it's not an uncommon perspective globally. But there is a very good reason why children's healthcare has been catered for socially in the UK for the best part of 60 years and is here to help specialist Dentist Devon. The habits and health concerns that develop during childhood and propagate through adult lives silently affect the quality of our teeth, for woe or well. So it is worth taking child's dental care seriously if you are a patient.
Oral hygiene education
The foundation of oral hygiene education revolves around regular and thorough brushing. It is not intuitive how to brush well and it requires repetition and care to establish a routine of good quality brushing. It is far too easy for parents to forget how much work really went into them learning to brush their teeth and becoming frustrated during the process.
It can be very helpful having an event like a conversation with the specialist Dentist Devon to refer back to; this can really help when stubbornness around brushing teeth rears its ugly head.
Treatment on children's teeth
There are treatments that can be applied to children's teeth like fluoride sealant and dental varnishes, which can be an effective way of minimising childhood cavities as well as a scale and polish that can be performed if necessary.
Children's teeth can be particularly vulnerable to acid erosion from soda and sour candy causing tooth sensitivity.
Monitoring and planning future care
One of the most useful aspects in childhood dentistry is not carrying out treatment itself but exploring tooth position and planning for future care. Seeing the location of children's teeth and being able to predict the position of adult teeth can provide great insight into whether usual orthodontic care will be required and to what level. This allows treatment with braces to start at the earliest possible time, increasing the chances of success and minimising the length of the procedures.
Getting first impressions right
The youngest patients can be 6 months or when the first teeth start to come through. Babies usually have 20 or so teeth; exactly how many and when they come through varies greatly from patient to patient. At these points, the visits to our specialist Dentist Devon are far more psychological and medically necessary. The idea is to get children used to attending the dentist, so they can see dentists as their friends and in essence a medical professional who is there to help them.
This is an important lesson to learn; the costs of a dental aversion can be massive and although not immediately obvious, adults who have gone for decades with minimal to no dental care can end up in very unpleasant situations. So although these early visits may seem trivial, there is a far greater value in them than is immediately apparent. If you have anxiety around the dentist yourself it may be best not to attend with your child but allow a trusted family member or friend who does not have dental concerns to take them. Children will look to their primary caregiver to see how they want to behave in new situations and if they sense anxiety from you, they will mirror it.