Tips to help your Kids Practice Good Dental Hygiene

 

Oral hygiene is not only important for preteens or adults, its also important for babies and toddlers. Starting dental care for your kids early can help the children have healthy teeth right from the beginning and can help form good oral habits from early on in their life. Smilestone is the Best Dental Clinic in Nagpur

Parents being the role models of the children, have a big role to play when it comes to dental hygiene, it is shown in multiple researches that parents who brush twice a day and floss regularly, have children who do the same. So parents taking the children to their dentist appointments and demonstrating healthy brushing techniques can help children form good dental habits a long way. We believe that as the kids grow, their dental habits should grow with them, so making it fun and creative can help kids keep engaged and interested in their daily brushing routine. Here are some tips we recommend for parents to try out with their children:-

 

1.     Letting them choose

 This is one of the most important things we have seen. Letting children choose their own fancy toothbrush and their favourite toothpaste flavour can get them excited to brush everyday. There are a lot of cartoon toothbrushes, colourful toothbrushes made especially for children. A child may not necessarily be interested in using the generic boring toothpaste that their parents use, so allowing them to choose a kid-special fluoride toothpaste with strawberry, mint and other flavours, can actually make them look forward to brushing routine.A child is always curious and inquisitive, and whenever adults make them feel that they are smart enough to make their own choices, the kids like to engage more in those activities.

 

2.    Brushing Timer

Use a fun brushing timer app or a regular timer to make sure the child brushes their teeth properly for 2 minutes, there are a lot of songs that can also be used as timers. For example, the famous song- Baby shark do do do is approximately 2 minutes long and the child can be easily engaged in the song and brush for that duration.

 

3.   Be a dental team

     Bush along with your children to show them how its done, while giving them enough space and independence to try to brush themselves from very early on in life. By making a sweet little brushing routine twice a day, a child is excited to spend time with the parents as well as form a habit of brushing twice a day. Besides that, it is important to monitor the way your kids are brushing for upto 5-6 years of age, until they learn to do it properly.

 

4.     Fun games/experiments

 Children love getting messy with craft activities, so why not use that to teach them good dental hygiene? There are various artsy activities available online in printable format to help kids navigate their teeth while brushing and also understand the important of brushing and how to avoid tooth decay. One of the fun games that we usually recommend is using ice cream sticks to represent teeth and putting some chocolate or brown removable colour on it to represent a child’s mouth who just ate a chocolate. The fun part comes when the child takes a toothbrush to try to brush those “teeth” in order to remove those chocolate stains.

 This activity shows children how important it is to brush for a longer period of time in order to get their teeth clean and makes it fun as well.

 

5.     Gold stars

 Why not create a little reward system for each time your kid brushes? Make a creative chart and stick it near the bathroom basin and every-time the kid brushes their teeth properly for 2 minutes, they get a gold star, which would be stuck on the chart. And at the end of the week they can get a healthy sweet snack or something else that they love. This will make the child look forward to brushing because they would be able to collect those shiny gold star stickers and also get a cute little reward at the end of every week/month. Dr.Arvind Ashtankar is the Best Dentist in Nagpur.

Keeping all the fun parts aside, it is very important to explain to the kids why brushing regularly and properly is important and the consequences of not having proper dental hygiene such as tooth decay, cavities, tooth extraction, bleeding gums etc. Their teeth are the most important aspect of their smiles, which need to be protected.  We also offer Best Orthodontist in Nagpur. For more details call us on, 09823154023  or visit us at- http://www.smilestonedentist.com/