oral health care | Oui Blog

October 4, 2016

4 Things To Do For Your Kids’ Dental Wellbeing

Excellent oral health not only helps you have an enviable smile, but it also helps you chew well, eat better, enjoy good nutrition and maintain good oral hygiene that has a positive impact on your overall wellbeing.

If you inculcate good oral hygiene habits in your family it will keep your loved ones’ smiles safe, as well as save you thousands of dollars. You very well know that restorative dental care is expensive so the best you can do is maintain your gums and teeth in good health.

If you have children in your family remember that they pick up oral care habits from you. Teaching them right will help your kids enjoy healthy teeth and beautiful smiles for a long time to come.

4 Things To Do For Your Kids' Dental Wellbeing

Here are a few tips for you to keep your family smiling healthy, safe and happy.

1. Schedule Regular Visits to the Dentist

Regular visits to the dentist are the single most effective way to prevent cavities and gum problems. It is important that you teach your kids the importance of being regular with dental checkups.

Your dentist will be able to spot plaque and tartar buildup in time, and remove them completely. This will put a stop to bacterial growth and activity, and prevent cavities from forming and gums from bleeding.

Dentists are also able to spot a range of other diseases whose first symptoms often appear as dental health issues. They will be able to suggest treatment or will refer you to other specialists.

In the case of children, it is important that your dentist regularly checks for cavities and decay. He will advise sealants to protect molars that appear by the age of six in kids. The dentist will also suggest fluoride treatments if he suspects that your little one is deficient in the cavity-fighting mineral.

Another benefit is that children learn the importance of being regular with dental visits. Professionals at Professionals at Meridian General and Family Dentistry make it a point to explain the basics of oral health to your kids. This ensures there is no hesitation in their minds in scheduling a dental health checkup when they grow up.

2. Follow a Healthy Lifestyle

A healthy and safe lifestyle is the biggest gift that you can give your kids. Kids naturally tend to get accustomed to the lifestyle they follow at home. If they see their parents eat timely and wholesome meals, and exercise and enjoy the outdoors, they too tend to do the same.

Make sure that you do not stock on aerated drinks and try to limit snacks like candies and chips. These food items are sugar-loaded and are not healthy. The sticky sugars present in them will speed up bacterial activity and dental decay, and damage your little ones’ teeth. Crackers and pretzels are fine and are not as damaging.

Introduce a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, and ensure that your kids learn to enjoy them. This might seem tough but if you are persistent and are innovative, you can definitely make healthy foods a part of your family’s daily diet. Also, it is important you too enjoy the healthy and nutritious food. If your children see parents enjoying fried snacks and sugary beverages, it will be hard to get them to follow a different routine.

Avoid eating before going to bed. Late night snacks, no matter whether you munch on an apple or rich pastry, encourage dental decay. There is reduced saliva production in the mouth at night and as a result food particles stay lodged in the mouth enabling bacterial activity. So ensure you do not let late-night snacking be a habit in your family.

3. Make Brushing Fun for Kids

Brush twice a day and floss regularly. Try to make brushing less of a chore and more of fun for your little ones. Let them choose the color of their toothbrushes and ensure that you rotate toothpastes with different flavors so that the routine becomes exciting. Praise your kids when they are regular with their brushing habits and reward them for their efforts.

4. Protect Children’s Teeth from Accidents

Children participating in contact sports are vulnerable to falls and accidents that can damage their teeth. Sometimes teeth break off or become loose as a result of collisions or blows on the playground. It is important that you are aware of what needs to be done on such occasions. Dentists recommend if the tooth has fallen off you gently wash it in cold water and hold it in place in the empty socket until you reach the hospital. You can also put in cold milk or a vial of sterile saline solution and take it to the hospital. This prevents drying out of dental roots. A plastic wrap can also help keep the ligament cells on the dental root moist.

If your child participates in sports, it is important that you get him or her a protective mouth guard. You can also request your dentist to have one custom made for your child.

Conclusion

It is necessary that you take special care to inculcate good oral hygiene habits in your kids. This is one gift that will last them a lifetime and one that they will be thankful for forever.

July 20, 2016

How To Prepare Your Kid For A Dental Appointment?

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A visit to the dentist’s clinic can be nerve-wracking for a kid. Even though a dentist in Quincy will ensure that the entire process that includes taking an appointment, check-up and treatment, is as smooth as possible, you still have to do your bit as a parent and make your child as comfortable as possible. The task becomes twice as difficult, when you have to prep your kid for the first dental surgery. The horror stories that float on the internet, are of no help either!

How To Prepare Your Kid For A Dental Appointment?

So, the question is, how can you prepare your child for a dental appointment, especially if it is their first time? Here are the points that will guide you.

1. Make your child familiar with the dentist’s clinic: More often than not, it is the dentist’s clinic, the dentist’s chair, uniform, mask and tools, which children find intimidating. This is why, your first step should be making your kid familiar with the dentist’s clinic. You can always call up the dental clinic a few days in advance to schedule a tour of the facility.

After meeting the dentists and the staff and getting used to the environment of the clinic, your kid will be anything but nervous on the day of the appointment.

2. Be honest, but don’t provide them too much information: Be honest about the visit to the dentist, especially if your child is going to have a complicated oral surgery. Tell them that they are going to a special kind of a doctor, who will help them. But don’t give them all the details. For instance, you may tell that it might take more than a few minutes for the surgery to get over. Or that, they will need to be on an empty stomach for a few hours (if anesthesia is involved).

Skip telling them “how exactly will it be done” and the technical jargons related to the surgery. Doing so will only scare them more.

3. Rehearse the steps: Kids generally feel ill at ease merely at the thought of the dentist (a stranger) probing their mouth using an unfamiliar equipment. Help them get rid of their fear by rehearsing the steps of a routine dental examination with them. Let them play the dentist by wearing mask, gloves and giving them a fake instrument, while you become the patient and lay down on a chair for the “treatment”. Similarly, you can play the dentist and let them be the patient. This will make them more confident of facing the real thing.

4. Listen to them: Your child is definitely going to ask you tons of questions regarding the dental appointment and all you have to do is listen to them. For instance, they’ll ask you – what dentists are supposed to do, how much time will the process take, will you be there by their side and most importantly, is it going to hurt?

Don’t shrug off questions or change the topic to something else. Children need to be given a valid explanation that will help them calm their fears and hence, listen to them and answer their questions one at a time.

5. Talk about the good stuff: A lot of dental procedures require the children to eat soft meals post-treatment. So, what you can do is, talk your kid and about all the yummy stuff they can have, provided that they patiently go through the entire treatment. Chart out a soft meal diet plan with them or discuss other perks like having an ice-lolly (when they are going to have a tooth pulled). This will encourage them further and give them a positive idea about the appointment.

6. Give assurance: Assure your child that you are going to be in the same vicinity/waiting outside for them till the surgery or the treatment gets over. This simple assurance also works wonders for kids. Also, when you are there with them before, during or after the surgery, hold their hands as this will constantly remind them that you are there with them. This will act as their safety net and gives them peace of mind.

7. Take their special toy: Allow you kid to take their special soft toy (lucky charm), a photograph of their choice, some comics or a blanket/comforter that smells like home to the dentist’s clinic. This builds up their courage and acts as a morale booster.

8. Let them play games in the waiting room: When you are in the waiting room with your kid, let them play some video games on a hand held console or a mobile device to keep their anxiety at bay. Most of the dental clinics also have a play area or toys, which keep kids busy.

9. Play their favorite song/movie: Dental clinics also play movies for their young patients to keep them engaged, especially during lengthy dental procedures. If this is not the case at the dental clinic you are visiting, then talk to your dentist beforehand and ask whether you can play your kid’s favorite song or a movie on a mobile device while they are being treated/examined.

10. Dress them up in comfortable clothes: Children can get quite fidgety when they are asked to stay still, especially in the dentist’s chair. This is the reason why you need to dress them up in comfortable clothes and shoes. These can be easily removed, if they need to change into a gown before or during the treatment.

Wrap up

Your kid’s first dental appointment can turn into a good experience and not a horror story by putting these tips into practice. At the same time, you should remind yourself that kids can be very unpredictable and if things don’t exactly go according to your plan A or even plan B for that matter, remember that the alphabet has 26 letters! Most importantly, be patient with your kid because the thought of being in a dentist’s clinic is probably as traumatic for them as it was for you, when you were their age.

June 25, 2016

Top Foods To Eat For Natural Oral Health

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With more and more of our food in today’s world being pre-processed, it can be a challenging task to find healthy food – let alone food that promotes natural oral health. However, with a bit of research and willingness to spend more time scouring the shelves at your local supermarket, it’s easier than you’d think to find food that helps you naturally achieve optimal oral health.

There is a lot of information on this topic available on the internet, but the best place to go for answers about tooth-friendly food is your dentist. If you need to find a dentist, Opt In Dental Advantage is a great site where you can search a large database of dentists, read their reviews, and find one that suits your needs. Using Opt In’s search tool is a more effective way to find helpful dentists than simply typing “dentist near me” into Google.

If you have any specific questions about types of food and their correlation to tooth health, we highly recommend speaking with your dentist. With that in mind, however, we do want to point you in the right direction by discussing a few of the foods proven over time to be great for the promotion of natural oral health.

Let’s take a look at some of those foods now.