Did you know that a child’s first dental visit is not only the most important dental but medical visit of their life? Did you know that oral health is more important when you are a child and that your childrens’ oral health lays the foundation to a bunch of lifelong tendencies like their speech, shape of their face, their future smile and even their behaviour?
Primary teeth or milk teeth are more important than permanent teeth. They are the bricks that will build the whole mouth and speech of a child, not only as a child but as a whole person.
Also regular checkups with a specialised kids’ dentist is important for children for screening and early recognition of habits like thumb sucking and mouth breathing habits. As these cause a change not only in their teeth but also in their face shape as they grow.
The thing with primary teeth care is that it is the foundation for their complete oral health. If a tooth is decayed beyond repair, we can not just remove and leave it. We need something to hold the space of these primary teeth till the age where their permanent teeth erupt. Only then can their permanent teeth erupt in a proper way. Else the child will develop speech issues due to this gap.
Tooth decay is the most common cause of visiting a dentist as a child but did you know that there are more aspects and causes associated with a child’s tooth decay than an adult’s cavities? From minute things like a feeding bottle or a teether toy left too long in their mouth, to deep seated parental neglect causing repeated cavities, a child’s oral health is a window to a lot.
The most common cause is due to consumption of a lot of sugary foods and improper brushing techniques. These are common with every child. But how do we treat them? If caught early, a simple and effective cavity filling is enough but in some cases the treatment might even range till a full clip placement.
Cavities in kids can be treated by –
- If the decay is very superficial then a regular cleaning and filling with separate child specific dental materials is performed.
- If the decay is moderate, we can remove a part of the tooth pulp and preserve the remaining tooth structure.
- If the decay is severe then we perform a complete pulp removal and filling with child specific dental materials as we still want that tooth to stay and grow naturally
