Kids Dental Care Starts Early

​We provide  Pediatric Dental Care and recommend that you bring your children in early and often.  Many parents call us asking when they should start to brush their kids teeth, when they should come to the dentist, if they need fluoride, etc.  We welcome these questions because it shows a focus on oral health care, something that all parents should do.  Each patient is unique and their needs can be as well.  For this reason, you should bring your child in for an examination so that we can work together to create a long-term treatment plan.  In the meantime, however, here are some basic guidelines for your kids dental care.

Start brushing their gums and teeth now.

When your baby is born, you can start to clean their gums at least once per day.  Use a room-temperature wash rag that is clean.  Gently wipe the milk and sugar off of their gums.  As they get older and begin to get teeth, this will actually feel good to them.  It will also create a routine that will make it easier to transition to brushing teeth once they have them.  As soon as your child does have teeth, they need to be brushed twice per day, just like yours.

Bring them in for kids dental care at one year.

Typically, we recommend that our young patients visit us for a dental exam and teeth cleaning as early as one year of age.  By this time, they have enough teeth to examine and we can tell if the rest are likely to grow in like they should.  On the first appointment, we may only examine them but as they get older, we will fully clean their teeth as well. By the time they are a toddler, they should be ready for a full teeth cleaning.

Why we want to start dental care early.

As a provider of kids dental care, we recommend that you bring your children to our office as soon as one year and continue to bring them in every six months for the rest of their life.  This may sound like a lot of dental appointments, but this is the best way to ensure that they can keep healthy teeth for a lifetime.  We need to start early because cavities can form at any age and it is our job to ensure that their teeth remain decay and infection free so that they can use them in comfort.

During appointments for preventative care, we will examine their teeth and clean them. If we notice that your child has deep ridges on the chewing surfaces of their teeth, we may recommend applying dental sealants.  This is a plastic-like material that is brushed onto the teeth so that nothing can become trapped there.  By keeping food particles and plaque from becoming stuck here, we can decrease the risk of your child developing cavities.  We may also recommend that they get a fluoride treatment since that also reduces cavities by 30 percent.  Our goal is to keep your child in excellent health so we will make age-appropriate recommendations as time goes on.