The care and keeping of your teeth is hugely important. Especially once your adult teeth come in. After all, you only get just one set of adult teeth in your life, making them very important to care for well. Regular brushing, flossing, and dental visits can help to keep your teeth in good shape – as well as your overall oral health and hygiene. However, it’s not just adult teeth that you must care for well. Baby teeth, sometimes known as milk teeth, must also be given proper care. This is because they serve as something of a placeholder for your adult teeth that tend to come in during early childhood. If you have not cared well for your baby teeth, you very well might have set yourself up for dental issues down the line.
Much of this will require the same level of care and keeping as adult teeth. While you as an adult should brush your teeth twice throughout the day, you should also help your children to do the same. Monitoring their brushing and helping them to get any hard to reach spots will be very important for more years than you might think. And when you have a baby or a toddler, you will have to do the brushing for them to ensure that they do not miss any spots. Using toothpaste with fluoride in it is a must for children as well, as fluoridated toothpaste will help to prevent baby teeth from decay.
And licensed dentists should be visited at least twice throughout the course of a year, or just about once every six months or so. This is due to the fact that licensed dentists will be able to more thoroughly clean your teeth, something that is often necessary to dental health even though you don’t need that level of cleaning absolutely every time that you brush. And licensed dentists can also just help you to keep an eye on things and determine if anything is wrong. Therefore, the role of licensed dentists is most certainly one of a huge importance. Getting your kids used to licensed dentists from a young age is also something that can be largely beneficial, thanks to the fact that early exposure can show children that there is nothing particularly scary at all about going to the dentist.
But if proper dental care is not obtained, children are likely to suffer as a result. For one thing, they will be much more likely to develop a cavity. Already, up to 40% of all American kids will have had at least one cavity, if not more, all by the time that they reach their school age years (by kindergarten, to be just a bit more specific). In addition to this, other issues with tooth decay are also likely to be present. After all, tooth decay is now up to 20 times more commonly found than diabetes – and diabetes is quite prevalent here in the United States. It is even as many as five times more prevalent and commonly seen than cases of childhood asthma.
And the toll that this takes is quite high already. After all, issues with tooth decay can lead to a great deal of dental pain, thought to be some of the worst pain out there for a number of reasons. And when a child is in pain, that child is much more likely to miss school. Already, up to 51 million hours of school are lost due to dental pain and dental pain alone. If a child has poor oral health, their chances of missing school for these reasons increases by as much as three times. But licensed dentists can help to change this, providing care and treatment for children who are in need of it and hopefully even instilling values for oral care that will last for a lifetime.
At the end of the day, and as licensed dentists can tell you, the care and keeping of your teeth is a hugely important thing and should very much be a priority in your life, from brushing to dental visits.
