Dental Services:
Kid Friendly Dentist
Emergency Dentist of Portland, Gresham, Happy Valley, Milwaukie
As a kid-friendly dentist in PORTLAND OREGON,
we treat young children and are the best place to bring your preschooler and elementary-age child for their first checkup.
What You Should Know
As a parent, you naturally want what is best for your child. Many parents are unaware of how oral health and dental care play into that. According to the Center for Disease Control, tooth decay (cavities) is the number one most commonly occurring infectious disease among children. This leads to children experiencing toothaches in high numbers, missing days from school, and experiencing overall discomfort.
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Tooth decay is not a trivial thing, but a condition that can create significant discomfort for your child and even make it difficult for them to eat, speak clearly, and engage in normal daily activities. Brushing and flossing at home will help, but it isn’t enough. You need to bring your child to our kid-friendly dentist office twice a year so that we can examine and clean their teeth in order to remove the plaque and bacteria that can lead to cavities in the first place.
Resources You Can Use at Home
In addition to visiting our kid-friendly dentist office, it is important that you practice good oral hygiene at home and teach your child to do the same. In our dental office, we work with a lot of children under age eight and understand how challenging it can be to get them excited about brushing teeth. Kids are busy and asking them to stop riding bikes, building Legos, or playing dress-up to brush their teeth can lead to conflict fairly quickly.
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We get it. At EMERGENCY DENTIST OF PORTLAND, GRESHAM, HAPPY VALLEY, MILWAUKIE, we are experts in working with young children and are under no illusion that they are fascinated by oral health. Our job, however, is to change their opinion of dental care and show them that it can be fun and interesting. This way they will want to brush and floss their teeth, even without being told. With that in mind, we have a few resources that we have found to be helpful and suggest that you try them at home.
Prevention
As a kid-friendly dentist office in PORTLAND OREGON, we are focused on preventative care. It is far better for your child to visit us for regular teeth cleaning than to only see us with a toothache.
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Fortunately, by using preventative care methods we can help your child to avoid experiencing any dental discomfort. In addition to cleaning their teeth, one of the ways that we do so is with dental sealant. Many children have deep ridges in their teeth. When they bite down and chew food, bacteria, food particles, and plaque can become trapped in those ridges, and eventually, they will create tooth decay. These areas are particularly difficult to clean with a toothbrush alone, so even the most fastidious of parents may find it challenging to keep cavities at bay. By using dental sealant, a protective layer is placed onto the teeth so that nothing can become stuck in these ridges. The procedure is painless and fast since all we need to do is brush a material onto the teeth and allow it to harden. We have found this to be a simple way to prevent our young patients from getting cavities.