We had our first trip to the dentist about one year ago. The lady dentist was fine but she wasn't in particular toddler friendly, I thought. She suggested that we should quite her thumb sucking habit as soon as possible, otherwise it may interfere with her teeth alignment. We are very thankful we did, a journey in and of it self that took 3 months to complete the process.
We decided to try Dr. Rashid, a Singaporean dentist seemingly specialized in taking care of the little teeth!
First impression, colorful waiting area with lot of toys and books. Thumbs up!
Dr. Rashid came to greet us. He is very friendly and seems to get along with kids well. Kodi likes him and giggled from time to time. She got on the dentist chair willingly and put on a cute sunglasses for Dr. Rashid to check all her teeth carefully. She watched Barney from a TV hung above the ceiling.
There was a small beginning sign of decay in the back of her upper front teeth. He said not to worry now because it may not go bad enough to take any action before she gets rid of her baby teeth.
There were also white rim/line found around the bottom of her two lower first molars. He said this is the beginning of tooth decay when the teeth become more porous and stuff get trapped in that gap. However it is reversible if we make sure that we clean well and stay away from sugar.
A huge thing I learned today is that, taking care of your teeth has more to do with limiting the exposure to sugar rather than how frequent you bruth your teeth. Wait... that doesn't sound entirely right. We still need to bruth and floss but having a chocolate bar and brush soon immediately afterward is not going to negate the effect because the exposure is already there. Am I making sense?
A friendly lady hygienist came after Dr. Rashid finished his examination. She gave me a detaild walk through using a big fake teeth to demonstrate the proper brushing technique. She also instructed me that sugar is always bad for teeth, although they say natural sugar found in fruits (not fruit juice) is fine. Therefore, a wie parent would try to limit giving kids sweet snacks in between meals. Sounds simple and doable, doesn't it?
Here are a quick jot downs of the take home message.
Instead of a sweet biscuits, give her butter toast, pretzel, cheese, crackers or other savory stuff.
No fruit juice no matter how 100% or healthy it seems like.
Fruits are always ok (even grapes!) but dried fruits are not.
Yogurt is good but try the original, non-sweetened kind (a good thing that we make our own yogurt!)
If we "must" give her sweets (which happens very often in our house because we all love desserts in this house), serve it soon after a meal to limit the frequency of exposure of sugar to the teeth.
Yeah we passed the check up! I am always worried about her teeth because I had bad teeth growing up. Now that I reflect upon what the lady said, I probably ate many sweet stuff even though I did bruth my teeth twice a day and rinse my mouth in between snacks. However, I probably had too much "exposure" to sugary stuff because of my sweet tooth!
Some changes in the snack box and get disciplined in when we eat that piece of cookie and chocolate cake!
