Dental home and First Dental Visit

Oral health is an extremely vital part of one’s overall health. By ensuring a healthy mouth for your little one, you would be drastically helping your kid reap its benefits for lifetime. To achieve this, it's recommended that you visit a Pediatric dentist (kids dentist) before the first year of your child’s life and establish a dental home.

The dental home is an ongoing relationship between the dentist and the patient, and includes all aspects of oral health care delivered in a comprehensive, continuously accessible, coordinated, and family-centered way. It is accessible, with a friendly environment and where all your child’s oral health needs can be catered to in a comprehensive way.

Dental home for the child should be established as soon as the first year of life. It helps to foster healthy oral hygiene practices right from the early years of life. Few parents are aware that there are specialised dentist for kids called as Pediatric Dentists. The first dental home for the child should be established in association with a Pediatric dentist (instead of a general dentist).

Dental home also helps for referrals to medical/ other dental specialists when needed.

When should you be taking your child for his/her first dental visit?

AAPD ( American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry) recommends the first visit of child to a Pediatric Dentist as soon as the first tooth comes out in the mouth or latest by the first birthday of the child. This early dental visit will lay a healthy foundation for your child’s oral health right from the start. The parents will be counselled on various aspects such as healthy feeding practices for their child, oral hygiene maintenance, teething related issues, baby bottle/nursing bottle tooth decay, injury prevention, finger/thumb sucking, caries risk assessment and more. It will include a comprehensive dental examination as well.

Usually parents bring their kid first time to a dentist when the child is in extreme pain due to dental caries or in emergency such as dental trauma. The child who is already in so much pain is often anxious and fearful …and the first dental visit which should have been pleasant turns out to be a not so pleasant experience.

The early preventive and friendly visit of you and your child to a kids dentist will help instill trust and positivity for years to come. It also avoids expensive and lengthy dental procedures later on. Tooth decay in kids spreads rapidly due to thin enamel in kids. It can impair eating properly leading to compromised nutrition, can affect speech, cause tremendous pain in advanced stages and also affect esthetics/ the beautiful smile of your child. In addition, the cavities can cause lower than ideal body weight and later cause the child to miss school days.

Sharing some oral hygiene tips for your little one:

· Oral hygiene should begin even before the teeth erupt. For that, clean the gums of the infant’s teeth using a clean wet gauze/wash cloth wrapped around your finger. This can be done after feeds or atleast during night time before sleeping.

· Avoid putting the baby to sleep with bottle of milk in mouth. Frequent night time bottle feeding can cause nursing caries/ decay in children.

· Once the teeth comes start erupting in the mouth at around 6-8 months, use a small baby toothbrush which has soft bristles and use just a rice grain size of toothpaste to brush.

· Avoid added sugar in diet till your child is 2 years of age.

· Limit the use of sugary food/beverages.

· The oral hygiene routine can be made fun by playing some brushing songs /rhymes during that time.

· Once more teeth come out and they start touching each other, you can introduce flossing as well.

· Encourage children to drink from cup as they turn 1.

· During teething, children may have sore gums and excessive drooling of saliva. You can give them a clean teething ring, or rub the gums with cold wet wash cloth.

· Parents should take care of their own oral hygiene too so that cavity causing bacteria are not transmitted to children.