New Year's Resolutions for a Healthy Smile: Tips from a Pediatric Dentist
Goodbye 2022 to welcome a prosperous 2023. Midway through November, the New Year’s resolutions are well underway for the oncoming year. What about your kids? Have you made any resolutions to prioritize your child’s smile? If you still need to, November is an excellent time to start when the dental office in Modesto, CA, isn’t dealing with the rush-hour traffic of December. Therefore scheduling an appointment with the practice with your kid helps make New Year’s resolutions for children to help with their health and smile.
Why Is Oral Health Important?
Oral health is essential for everyone, including children. Your mouth is the gateway to your entire body. An oral health infection can make you vulnerable to conditions in other parts of the body.
Children’s oral health gains more significance because their teeth are developing, making it essential for them to maintain appropriate dental hygiene to ensure they don’t lose their primary teeth prematurely, causing problems with their bite, misalignments, and infections in their mouth that can have an impact on their overall health. Therefore everyone in the family must maintain excellent dental hygiene practices to ensure their oral health is optimal to benefit their overall well-being.
What Are Some Tips for Keeping a Healthy Smile?
The pediatric dentist in Modesto, CA, suggests the following pediatric dental tips to keep your child’s oral health optimal. They are:
Regular Brushing and Flossing
Adults and children are guilty of neglecting practices of brushing and flossing regularly despite receiving countless reminders from dentists. Although most people brush their teeth twice daily, they indulge in this practice for approximately 40 seconds instead of the recommended two minutes each time. Brushing teeth for two minutes in the morning and night with fluoride toothpaste is recommended by most dentists to ensure patients remove most food particles and dental plaque from their teeth. Unfortunately, removing plaque from every nook and corner of the mouth is practically impossible because specks of plaque remain hidden between the teeth, making them challenging to remove. To overcome this challenge, dentists insist on flossing at least once daily regardless of the time.
Brushing the teeth twice daily is an excellent New Year’s resolution. Unfortunately, it only helps eliminate food and debris on and between the teeth. Dental plaque remaining undetected and left in the mouth leads to harmful buildups, making children and adults vulnerable to infections like tooth decay and gum disease. If you intend to improve your child’s oral health in 2023, you must make flossing an essential part of their dental hygiene routine. Use the new year’s arrival as an occasion to make flossing a family affair because your child loves to mimic what you do. Demonstrate how you floss, and you might soon receive a demonstration from your kids to indulge in the practice appropriately.
Brushing and flossing help eliminate food particles and debris from the mouth. However, if you encourage children to have tooth-friendly foods like vegetables by cutting down on condiments like candy by giving them whole foods, fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and healthy fats, you help ensure their mouth is not home to sugary and starchy foods responsible for dental infections.
Drinking plenty of water is also essential for children instead of having sugary drinks that merely create problems in the mouth instead of benefiting them. Ensure your kid has plenty of water because it is the healthiest drink. Besides hydrating the body, it also helps wash harmful bacteria and plaque buildup on the teeth. Besides, the above water helps boost saliva production to prevent tooth decay eventually. Discuss a tooth-friendly beverage with your kids and refrain from packing sugary drinks like juices in your kid’s lunchbox to encourage them to have more water instead of other drinks.
Children always run around and fall, chipping and breaking their teeth or even losing them. Avoid such occurrences that might require dental restorations, space maintainers, and other treatments that cost an arm and a leg and cause plenty of pain to your kid. Instead, get them a custom-created mouthguard from the Modesto pediatric dentist to ensure you safeguard their teeth from accidental injuries.
Schedule Regular Dental Checkups with Your Nearby Pediatric Dentist
Twice-yearly dental visits are not exclusively reserved for adults. In contrast, children also require pediatric dental trips for exams and cleanings to ensure no infections develop in their mouths or treat them if they have already occurred.
Making a New Year’s resolution without following the suggestions in this article will make your kid prone to oral health problems that might affect their overall health over time.
When making New Year’s resolutions for your kid, it helps if you consult with 123 iSmile, providing suggestions to keep your child’s oral health in optimal shape. Discuss the tips they provide with them today to prepare your kid for the resolutions you make for them for 2023.