5 Steps to a Family with Healthy Smiles
Getting your kids to be excited about good oral hygiene practices (like brushing and flossing) can seem like an insurmountable task. Often, children can be adamantly opposed to brushing their teeth. Professionals in family dentistry support helping children develop good habits early, even if a child's first teeth are going to fall out. Sometimes, decay in the primary teeth can lead to decay in a child’s permanent teeth before the permanent teeth even emerge. So how do you get your child to enjoy brushing their teeth and flossing? Here are five easy tricks to get your children on the road to fantastic dental hygiene.
1. One of the best ways to get kids excited about brushing is to show them how you brush your teeth. Children generally wish to do what the adults are doing, especially if those adults are their parents. Let your kids watch you brush and floss your teeth, and explain the purpose behind good dental hygiene.
If the kids don’t seem to be very responsive, you can make up a story to go along with it. You don’t want to scare your children, so make sure the story is fun.
Having toothpaste be a superhero fighting off a bunch of villainous bacteria, or having toothpaste be a great knight in medieval times are both great stories to get kids invested in brushing.
2. Building off of the idea that children want to be more like adults, you should allow your child to make some choices. Choices can make empower a child and make them feel like they are maturing. There are many choices involved in child dental care, such as their toothbrush and their toothpaste. If a kid made the choice of what to use, they’re going to be more excited about using it.
3. It’s important to get kids used to brushing for about 2 minutes. There are many ways to achieve this, but children generally have short attention spans and get bored. You want to make it fun to keep the child invested. A great way to achieve this is to come up with a song and dance. If a child is having fun dancing or singing, they’ll lose track of time, and the two minutes will pass by without them noticing. Be careful about causing a mess while singing and moving around with a mouth full of toothpaste.
4. Children love to be praised, especially by their parents. Make sure you’re going out of your way to make sure to tell your child what a great job they did after they brush and floss. Make an especially big deal out of it if the child remembered to brush without you reminding them. This reinforces good behavior and helps them start building a habit of brushing their teeth.
5. Rewarding a child who remembers to brush their teeth can reinforce good habits more effectively than anything. Try to avoid rewarding your children with anything like candy or sweets, but a later bedtime or even more time with the TV are great rewards for a diligent child. You can even build up from smaller prizes to larger ones. Maybe if the child goes an entire month without forgetting to brush their teeth, you take them somewhere that they’ve always wanted to go like an amusement park or the zoo.
