When Should I Bring My Child for Their First Dental Appointment?

This is a GREAT question! Honestly there’s a part of me that wants to say “the sooner, the better”! Guidelines, however, recommend coming in within 6 months after the eruption of your little one’s first tooth. You might wonder, “but they only have one tooth, why do I need to come in so early?” That’s a fair question and my response would be: caries (the disease that causes cavities) is the most common childhood disease in our country. The sooner we can discuss all of the things we’d like you to do and habits we’d like you to have in order to try and prevent cavities from starting to form, the better. 

These first few visits are focused on prevention strategies, discussion of growth and development and establishing your child’s new dental home as a safe & happy place. I hope your child will never need treatment, but if they do, I want them to come to a place with people they know, people who they trust and feel comfortable with. I’ll give you a quick example. I had a patient a few years ago whose father called me after hours saying that he had fallen and hit his front tooth on a fountain in their backyard. He was really worried because there was blood all around the kid’s mouth. I asked him to please come in immediately to my office and we would see what was going on. 

Now, this child had been coming to the dentist and the same dentist for almost 2 years (and he was only 3, so that’s a big proportion of his life). He saw me when he arrived and he recognized me. I talked to him just like I always do as I took x-rays and explained to his parents that the crown of the tooth had fractured off of the root and the only treatment would be to remove the entire baby tooth. Of course this was upsetting to the parents and I don’t blame them.

For that little boy though, it was just another day. I showed him the nitrous oxide mask (new) and explained how jelly can put his tooth to sleep and help it feel better (new) and because he had already known me and seen me explain many other *easy* things, he was able to sit in the chair on his own with his dad holding his hands and I took out that tooth with almost no response from him at all. As the appointment was wrapping up, his father marveled at how well it had gone and I remarked it was only because I had such a “great helper” to which he replied “oh, I don’t know how helpful I was…” (but of course I was speaking about my patient). It wasn’t scary to my little patient because he knew me, he knew the office, he knew it was a safe place for him. Beyond learning how to care for his teeth, this little man learned that he could come to my office & be safe, even when he was experiencing something a little scary. 

So bring your child into a pediatric dentist soon; let them develop a relationship with the dentist who will be there to watch them grow up & who will be there to help them whenever the need might arise.