Your Child's First Dental Visit in Cincinnati, OH

The first time you bring your child in, depending on how old they are, we usually recommend around two years old, it's sort of we'll take it however the child sort of responds. If they're very anxious and nervous, a lot of times we'll have the child sit in the parent's lap and just kind of try and take a cursory look. We'll try and brush their teeth. We'll try and count everything, make sure it looks good.

We really just want to get them used to coming to the dentist. Then every time they come after, we'll try and do a little bit more. Clean a little bit more of their teeth, maybe polish them. Hopefully when they're old enough, we can take X-rays to make sure everything looks good.

We really work with the kids. I don't want to traumatize any kid at a young age. It's not the goal. The goal is just to make them comfortable coming in, seeing us. That way we'll have better dental patients in the future.

So we welcome kids of all ages to come see us here at Bell Dental Group. Some kids are more excited than others, some are terrified, and we really let them set the pace. If they want to just get in the chair and they sit there for five minutes and we hang out and show them our instruments, that's fine. We can bring them back to actually complete the cleaning another day. We don't want them to have a bad first experience. We do want them to be excited to come back and see us. I like to do what's called tell, show, do. So I'll tell the child what I'm about to do. I will show them every instrument I'm going to use and then actually complete that step on them. So we let them set the pace. We let the parents come back if the kid wants them back there. If the kid doesn't want them back, we'll let Mom or Dad wait in the waiting room, and we'll fill them in on everything at the end.

So, for the first appointment with your kid, what you can expect is we really kind of follow the lead of the child.
We're not going to force them to do anything that they don't want to do. A lot of times what we'll actually have is we'll have the parents sit in the chair and the child will sit on their lap. That way when we're kind of leaning the chair back and things like that, they can feel comfortable sort of in their parents’ arms.

What we'll do is we'll kind of lean you back, we'll grab the mirror and our tooth counter. Really that first visit is just to kind of get them used to everything. So, getting them used to being open and letting me count their teeth just to make sure they have everything that they're supposed to have. If they will let us, we'll go ahead and clean their teeth, but really we like to just let the child kind of take the lead, and we just sort of follow after that. Then sort of every six months, we sort of build on that. So, if last time all they let me do is count their teeth, the next time, a lot of times they'll let me count them and clean them. It's really sort of baby steps to kind of get them used to dentistry so that as adults, they actually like coming to see us.

It's important for you to bring your children to the dentist and for them to get that comfortable because even though they're baby teeth, they are going to lose them. They’re not their permanent teeth; you want to keep them from getting cavities because you want them to have a good experience with teeth in general. Also, those baby teeth are important because they hold the space for the permanent teeth. So, if you end up getting cavities on those baby teeth, they're losing them early. You're more likely to lose space for those permanent teeth, and then you're definitely looking at sort of braces and kind of problems down the line. So, we like to make sure that you bring your children in early, and they have kind of a stepwise approach to dentistry so that we can really keep their oral hygiene starting when they're little and keep all those good habits and keep building on this.