Proper dental care is important for any adult. After all, you only get one set of adult teeth and if you lose them, it can have a serious detrimental impact on your life. Fortunately, there are many ways in which you can care for your teeth, such as brushing twice a day, flossing once a day, and visiting the dentist twice a year. But it’s not just adult teeth that we have to keep in mind. In addition to our adult teeth, helping our children care for their baby teeth is a matter of considerable importance as well.
After all, baby teeth are not merely placeholders for adult teeth. While some people might not think that baby teeth matter all that much because they eventually do fall out, baby teeth can have a considerable impact on your child’s overall quality of life. In addition to this, baby teeth and their overall health can greatly impact the overall health (and overall dental health) of the adult teeth that replace them. Caring well for baby teeth also helps to set your kids up for lifelong good habits in the realm of their oral and dental hygiene and health.
The impact of not caring for your child’s teeth can be larger than you realize. For one thing, cavities are quite common among children, with up to 40% of all American kids having had at least one cavity by the time that they reach their kindergarten years. By the time that they reach adulthood, more than 90% of all people will have had at least one cavity, if not many more. And while cavities are obviously common and easily treated, getting them filled can prove painful and less than ideal.
Sadly, children also miss school due to matters of dental health. When a child has an untreated cavity or another unaddressed dental issue, it can cause them a great deal of pain, pain that is great enough to warrant missing a school day, something that can compound and worsen the longer that they go without proper dental hygiene and proper dental care through pediatric dentistry. In total, this amounts to more than 50 million lost hours of school due to dental concerns just over the course of one year and just here in the United States alone.
Fortunately, there are steps that can be taken to prevent your child from suffering with such problems. For instance, there are dentists out there who specialize in dentistry for children. Dentistry for children looks much like dentistry for adults, and both dentistry for children and for adults should occur on a regular basis. Ideally, you should be taking your child in to see a child dentist at least once every six months – the same amount of times you should be seeing your own dentist throughout the course of a year.
Pediatric dentistry for children should begin at a very young age. Ideally, most pediatric dentists want to see children for the first time between the ages of one and two. Though pediatric dentistry for children won’t involve the whole process that it does for adults, pediatric dentistry for children can help to play a big role in getting your child used to the dentist and able to visit them with ease and very little in the way of anxiety. Regular pediatric dentistry for children will help to prevent a whole slew of dental problems, making pediatric dentistry for children an easy way to help ensure a high quality of life for your child.
In addition to pediatric dentistry for children, you should also help to introduce regular teeth brushing and flossing from a young age. As soon as the first teeth erupt, a wet cloth should be used to wipe them down regularly, even though no toothpaste will need to be introduced until later. And once it is time to introduce a toothbrush and toothpaste, helping your children to properly utilize these tools will ensure that they don’t develop any dental issues. While some children are simply more prone to cavities than others, you can drastically cut down on their total number of cavities by helping them.