A mother’s love for her children: Don’t share your dental anxiety with your kids

For many of us, our children spent this past weekend professing their love for us.  We care for them, we nurture them, and the days following Mother’s Day is a perfect time to reflect on how our love shapes our children.

As mothers, we pass along many of our hopes, dreams, and fears to our children, as well as many of our personality traits.  And we do most of this unconsciously, without even trying.

When it comes to going to the dentist, we moms need to remember that it’s easy to teach our kids to dread or even fear going to the dentist. When we suffer from anxiety, fear, or phobia of going to the dentist our kids pick up on it.  Often, they see the distress it causes us and they internalize it and make it their own.  When we say things like “You’ll need a mouthful of fillings if you don’t brush your teeth” it makes our children even more leery of going to the dentist.

One of the greatest things you can do for your child’s long-term oral health is to make sure they have a good experience at the dentist to dispel any anxieties they may have inherited from you.  A great way to begin the process is to talk about the experience in advance.  Here are some simple things you can do with them:

• Talk to them with excitement about the adventure of going to the dentist
• Chat about how much fun it is to ride up and down in the special chair
• Discuss how neat it is to see their teeth on the special pictures the dentist takes (if they are old enough for x-rays)
• Help them count their teeth, just like the dentist will
• Tell them how shiny and “slippery” their teeth will be after getting them cleaned
• Arrive early and read some waiting room books about kids visiting the dentist and having a great time, or check some out from the library
• Remember to mention that Shamblott Family Dentistry has great prizes for kids at every visit

For more information about Shamblott Family Dentistry’s children’s process, visit our website.   It has helpful information on preparing you for your child’s dental visits.

Our children have a special day in which they recognize how wonderful we are, but in kind, we don’t have a day to recognize how truly amazing they are.  So we can take a little time each day to be astonished at what our kids learn, and appreciate how much they learn from us.  And we all do our best to make sure our anxieties, fears and phobias don’t transfer to our astonishingly bright children.

Make your child’s routine cleaning appointment and exam with Shamblott Family Dentistry.  We will not only treat your child with kid gloves, we will treat you with them too.  A mother’s love can go a long way to helping your child with new experiences, like visiting the dentist.

We hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day filled with love and laughter!