Tips for teaching kids oral hygiene

The fight against tooth decay and oral disease begins with education. The best time to educate people is when they are young. It is therefore beneficial to teach kids about good oral hygiene and to reinforce good oral hygiene habits. There are a number of ways that this can be done, but it can sometimes be difficult to get the message across. Some of the best tips for teaching kids oral hygiene include:

Let them choose their own brush and toothpaste and make brushing exciting:

If you have younger children then you need to make tooth brushing a fun time. Let them choose a toothbrush which they like (one with their favourite cartoon character on it is usually a good option), and help them choose a children's toothpaste which is ‘just for them’.

You can take all sorts of steps to make brushing exciting. Create a rewards system so that your child learns that there are benefits associated with brushing their teeth. You can make sure that teeth are brushed before things like bedtime stories or night time TV. Some parents even associate the routine of tooth brushing with music, allowing their children to choose what music they want to play every night when they brush their teeth.

Basically, all you are trying to do is make it exciting and rewarding for your child when they brush their teeth, reinforcing it as a practice that they should continue.

Encourage healthy snacks:

Healthy eating is a major component of dental and oral hygiene. Teaching your kids that healthy snacks are better than candy or chips is one of the most difficult things to do as a parent. One way that you can do this is to make sure that you only let them eat a lolly on special occasions, but make healthy snacks readily available for them everyday.

Make dentists visits part of a fun day out rather than something to be endured:

Rewarding your child for sitting through a dentist’s visit will reinforce the idea that the dentist is something to be endured, rather than something which is important and necessary. Instead, turn it into something fun which is looked forward to and enjoyed. You can do this by combining it with other activities such as a visit to the beach or the park and by reading books and learning about the dentist before visiting. If something is seen as fun, your child will be happy to do it regularly!