Are Your Kids Afraid of Going to The Dentist?
Do Your Kids Fear The Dentist?
Every parent knows that children’s dental health is important, just as their overall health is.
But sometimes it can be incredibly challenging or just downright difficult to get your child – or children – to the dentist.
Is your child afraid of going to the dentist?
It’s no secret kids pick up a lot from parents, but fear is generally not an emotion handed down by way of genetics.
Most often when kids feel fear about going to the dentist, there are triggers and obvious causes for these overwhelming emotions to take hold…and often times we as parents are to blame.
Sometimes (read: most of the time) it is our fault, as parents for passing along the fear we feel about the dentist directly to our kids.
We’ve had the bad dental experience and have been subject to the less than kid-friendly hands of a back in the day dentist.
Parents of today have endured the not so ergonomic design of dental torture chairs of generations gone by.
We’ve had the not so pleasurable experience of sitting through an old-school root canal or getting a filling without the help of numbing gels to ease the needle stick.
We have that nostalgic first-hand remembrance of dental pain, fear, and anxiety; but we need not pass down these negative experiences to our kids.
Nowadays dentists (parents & kids too) are different. Like, way different…
Today’s Kids Don’t Need to Fear the Dentist
Dental technology has improved to the point of painless, but kids still have fear.
It’s not a matter of erasing our kid’s dental fear, it’s about reprogramming your own dental health habits then passing those valuable attributes down to your kids.
Parents need to set a positive example; not only in youth sports, nutrition, education, arts & music, and social interactions…but also in dental health!
If your kids have dental anxiety we need to explore the triggers and causes of this misdirected dental dread.
3 Quick & Easy Tactics for Dealing with Your Kids Fear of the Dentist
1. Educate kids on why dental health is important – will they be more afraid of a dentist or a cavity creep?
2. Share your dental health successes with your kids – talk to them about your dental appointments, show them pictures, videos, and books. And talk about the cool tools your awesome dentist uses to fend off said cavity creeps.
3. Don’t talk bad about going to the dentist yourself.
That last one will probably have more impact on the mindset of your kids when it comes to dental appointments than anything else.
As all parents know, kids are very quick to point out our hypocrisy – don’t enable children’s dental fear by unknowingly communicating dental health negativity!
How do you apply the advanced dental anxiety abatement tactic of releasing only the necessary information to get your child to, through, and from their dental appointment?
Got any other interesting tips on getting your kids to the dentist, sans the fear?
Care enough to share with your Facebook friends?
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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Dental Patient News and has been republished here with permission. It has since been updated for accuracy & comprehensiveness.
