Oral Health Care For Kids Whilst They Are Off School
Advice from our Addlestone dental team on how to look after your children’s teeth during ‘lockdown’
The current ‘lockdown’ situation is a challenging one for most of us and for any number of different reasons.
Those of us who have children that are currently off school will have their own set of challenges, both in trying to keep them safe as well as entertained.
Like everyone else, we are waiting for signs that the lockdown might be at least eased, but it is important that this is done at the right time and that may mean that our children may not return to school until the new school year at the earliest.
Change of routines
Lots of things will have changed in our lives, and perhaps more importantly, our children’s lives. In general, kids like some form of routine that they can structure their day around. This includes having certain regular times that they clean their teeth. Under normal circumstances, this would probably be done before they left for school in the morning. As they won’t be doing this presently, this creates a risk that their morning brushing at least may be missed altogether.
Some people might believe that the morning brushing is not that important as we haven’t eaten anything whilst asleep. The fact though is that bacteria accumulate whilst we are asleep and can contribute to both tooth decay and gum disease. The morning brushing is equally important as your regular night time one.
You may need to try to instigate a new routine in the morning. You will know your children better than us and for some, that might mean getting them to brush before they do anything else and become distracted. For others, it might be better to let them wake up a bit and avoid any arguments early in the day. The important thing is to stick to whatever new routine you develop that works for your family.
It has been 3 weeks now, and to some of us it will likely have felt like a lot longer! The current lockdown brings different challenges for different people, with some struggling with it more than others.
At the Synergy Clinic we perform both restorative and cosmetic dentistry on all types of teeth, both front and rear. Although most dental issues can occur with any tooth, there are areas of the mouth where certain problems are more common.
At the Synergy Clinic, each and every one of our team strives to improve the oral health of our patients, both in preventative and restorative roles. Although most of our blogs will continue to offer general dental advice as well as discussing various treatments that we offer, we will also take the opportunity to look at the roles that individual dentists play within our practice.
We often discuss how you can take better care of your teeth as adults. For babies and very young children though, they can’t take care of their own teeth and the responsibility falls to their parents to do so. Oral health care for a baby is important but sometimes gets forgotten amongst the hundreds of other things there are to do.
The teeth whitening procedure has been steadily growing in popularity for a number of years, perhaps spurred on by TV shows such as Love Island. Whilst it was once more widely used by middle aged people whose teeth had started to discolour as they got older, it is increasingly popular with younger people who are looking to achieve a perfect smile like those on the TV.
One of the biggest advances in dental technology over the past twenty years or so has been the increasingly widespread use of dental implants to replace missing teeth. Whilst dentures do have some advantages, such as removing the need for a procedure in many cases, they also have a number of drawbacks for a lot of people who wear them.
Have you made any New Year’s resolutions? Is to stop smoking one of them? If so, you will be one of many thousands who attempt to do this each year. Some will succeed while others will fail to maintain it for very long and there are good reasons for this. Apart from the fact that it is often a social habit and one that is sometimes influenced by our peer group, cigarettes contain nicotine, a highly addictive substance that can lead to withdrawal symptoms when we deprive our bodies of it by not smoking.
This will be our last blog post before Xmas so we thought that we would use it to look forward to the year ahead, and especially for patients of the Synergy Clinic who may be considering some improvements to their smile in 2020.
