In my experience as a dentist and father of two girls, teeth and teething are amongst the most common causes of questions and wild speculation I have come across.
In this brief guide I will aim to list a few facts, give a few tips and hopefully demystify why your calm, quiet 10 month old has become a rash covered dribbling bundle of sleepless fury in the last 24 hours. Continue reading
If a child is in pain, then don’t be afraid to reach for the painkillers – ibuprofen and paracetamol (eg: nurofen and calpol sugar free syrups) can be very effective at getting a child through a night or two of discomfort, and giving weary parents a break. Ensure you follow the directions on the bottle and they are perfectly safe.
Brushing teeth can be a source of much conflict with little ones, however it is important to try and make it work. When brushing try (as far as is possible), to make it a collaborative process. Often sitting the child on your knee and brushing from the side, rather than face to face can help with this. If your child wants control of the brush then giving them a second brush (let them have choice of which they want, and you use the other one) can work.
Thumb and dummy sucking are common in many children. My first daughter never had a dummy or sucked her thumb, and has never shown any interest in doing so. However on our first night home after my wife delivered our second daughter it became very obvious that if we didn’t put a dummy in her mouth then the thumb was going to take up residency instead! We opted for a dummy, partly as it’s easier to get rid of a dummy later on, and partly as the sucking of a finger or thumb can lead to the finger or thumb becoming thinner and less developed than it would otherwise be.