Preparing your Child for Dental Appointments

Parents often are unsure how to mentally prepare their children for dental appointments, sometimes forgetting that their own anxiety can be passed down unintentionally. Children remember intimidating stories and words such as ‘pain’, ‘scared’, or ‘needle’ and might associate these fears with dentistry throughout adulthood. The truth is if we start off right, most children will have a healthy outlook and positive experiences at the dentist.

As a local Calgary dentist, we would love to share some tips for our patients to prepare children for their dental visits:

• Keep explanations simple! Don’t go into detail about freezing, needles, and cavities. Instead try something like “The dentist is going to fix your tooth and he will show you how he does it at the appointment.”

• Present check-ups as an exciting event. Instead of saying “The dentist is going to check for cavities” try saying “The dentist will count all of your teeth and take pictures to see how healthy they are!”

• Promote proper home care! Preventing cavities is the easiest way to make dental visits easy. Please don’t threaten children with dental appointments and cavities when they refuse to brush. Make it a goal to ‘show the dentist how clean you keep your teeth’. We even carry some children’s toothbrushes that play different sounds the longer you brush, and have changeable face plates!

These are just a few of the steps to make dental appointments easier for kids. We have a free information guide with more tips available here at the office; please contact us for a copy!

Clean teeth are happy teeth!

Kaitlin B