Infant oral care has to begin at home, at the earliest possible time. Parents play a major role in imparting oral care for the infants. Early dental intervention and screenings will help to educate parents about the dental preventive care, thereby reducing early childhood caries and infection.

It is advisable to take the child to your dentist as early as 6 months after the first teeth appear or at 1 year of age, whichever comes first. Any other diseases, injuries, developmental problems should require earlier intervention.

Infant Care:

It’s a good practice to clean your baby’s gums and the teeth by rubbing a clean wash cloth along the baby’s upper and lower gums. Babies get used to their mouth cleaning, when done regularly.

Teething:

This occurs during the eruption of first few teeth. It makes the child irritable or fussy, they tend to be restless or refuse to eat properly.

Teething rings, hard rusks, frozen items like sliced vegetables or packed ice cubes can help solve teething problems.

Oral Hygiene:

When your baby teeth are getting erupted, start brushing their teeth at least twice a day with a soft bristles tooth brush and water.

Diet Counselling:

1. Infants should be exclusively breast fed until 6 months of age, followed by iron rich solid food between 6-12 months of age.
2. Infant formulas can cause caries. So parents should not allow their child to sleep with the bottle feeding done. This will cause nursing bottle tooth decay which can spread to all the teeth very rapidly.
3. Advisable to wean off breast feeding after 1 to 1.5 years of age and encourage child to drink from cup.
4. Infants above six months of age, who has reduced exposure to fluoride in their drinking water, should use fluoride tooth paste or chewing gums. Optimal usage of fluoride will help prevent tooth decay in primary dentition.
5. Parents should be counselled to reduce sugar consumption frequency. Mashed or pureed fruit/vegetables with natural sugar is much safer than juices.

Non-nutritive habits:

Using pacifiers, thumb sucking and tongue thrusting habits should be weaned off early so as to avoid malalignment of permanent teeth and skeletal variations in growing face.

Injury prevention:

Use of properly fitted mouth guards will prevent child from getting injured during sporting activities. In case of hit injuries like avulsed tooth (come out as a whole) immediate dental care is mandatory.

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