Dental Articles - Waterdown

Back to School: A Dental Checklist for Waterdown Families

September is the busiest month of the year in most dental practices, for an obvious reason: everybody remembers at once. A little planning gets you appointments at convenient times rather than whatever is left in October.

Book the checkup before the term fills up

After school slots between roughly 3:30 and 6:00 pm are the first to disappear and the last to reappear. We are open until 7:00 pm Monday to Friday and from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm on Saturday, which helps, but the principle holds: book early and you choose the time, book late and the time chooses you.

If more than one child needs seeing, ask about consecutive appointments so it is one trip rather than three. And if a child is starting at a new school or has been anxious previously, an early-in-the-day appointment usually goes better than one at the end of a long school day.

Mouthguards, before the first practice, not after

Fall is when hockey, football, rugby, basketball and soccer all start at once. A dental injury in the first weeks of a season is common, and it is one of the few dental problems that is almost entirely preventable.

There are three kinds of mouthguard and they are not equivalent.

Stock guards come ready-made in a few sizes. They are cheap, they fit nobody in particular, and because they have to be held in place by biting down they interfere with speech and breathing. Children take them out.

Boil-and-bite guards are softened in hot water and formed in the mouth. Better than stock, and a reasonable stopgap, but the material thins exactly where it is bitten hardest, which is where protection matters most.

Custom guards are made from an impression of your child's own teeth, so thickness is controlled where it counts and the guard stays put without being clenched. It can be spoken through and breathed through, which is the practical reason children actually keep them in. See sport guards.

Two things parents often ask. A child in braces needs a guard designed for braces, because a standard one can be forced against the brackets on impact. And a guard that fitted last season may not fit now, since a child of nine to fourteen is losing teeth and gaining adult ones continuously. Check the fit before the season, not during it.

Lunchboxes: frequency beats quantity

This is the single most useful thing to understand about children and cavities. Every time sugar reaches the teeth, the mouth turns acidic for a period afterwards while saliva neutralises it. Damage is driven by how many times a day that happens, far more than by the total amount consumed.

A dessert eaten at the end of lunch does less harm than the same thing grazed across an afternoon. Snacks in a bag that get picked at between classes are worse than the same food eaten in one sitting.

Worth knowing: juice boxes and sports drinks are both sugary and acidic, so they attack twice. Dried fruit and fruit snacks stick to the grooves of molars and hold sugar against the tooth far longer than fresh fruit does. Water and milk are the everyday drinks. Cheese at the end of a meal genuinely helps, because it raises pH and supplies calcium.

The rest of the checklist

Replace the toothbrush. Frayed bristles do not clean. A new one at the start of term is an easy habit, then roughly every three months.

Supervise brushing longer than you think. The manual dexterity for genuinely effective brushing arrives later than most parents expect, generally around seven or eight. Until then, brush for them or after them, and encourage spitting rather than rinsing so the fluoride stays on the teeth.

Ask about sealants and fluoride. Adult molars arrive around six and twelve, and their biting surfaces have deep grooves that a brush bristle cannot enter. Fluoride application and sealing those grooves shortly after the teeth erupt is straightforward, preventive and far cheaper than a filling later.

Know what to do in an emergency. If an adult tooth is knocked out, the first half hour decides whether it can be saved. Handle it by the crown, never the root, and keep it in milk or back in the socket. Our guide to what to do in the first hour is worth reading before you need it.

If your child has not been seen before, our note on a first dental visit covers what happens and how to prepare them. Families are also covered under the Canadian Dental Care Plan where they qualify.

Panacea Dental is at 105 Clappison Ave #103 in Waterdown, open Monday to Friday from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm and Saturday from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. We are accepting new patients. Call 289-408-5100 or book online.

Frequently Asked Questions