Ice from the bottom of a cup. The end of a pencil. A plastic toy, a shirt collar, a pen cap, a straw. Children chew on things, and most of the time it’s harmless. The trouble starts when the object is hard, the chewing is habitual, and it lands on the same teeth every...
Most parents notice it before their child does. The nails are bitten down past the fingertip, the cuticles look ragged, and it seems to happen whenever your child is watching TV, riding in the car, or concentrating on homework. Somewhere in there comes the question we...
Most advice about brushing a young child’s teeth focuses on the child. Very little of it addresses the practical question caregivers actually run into: how do you physically hold a small, mobile person so you can see what you’re doing and reach the teeth that matter?...
Some children will happily accept a toothbrush and refuse the toothpaste. They gag on it, spit it straight out, complain that it’s spicy or burns, or clamp down the moment they smell it. If that describes brushing at your house, the problem isn’t defiance. It’s the...
If your toddler hates toothbrushing and bedtime has turned into a two-minute wrestling match, you’re not doing anything wrong. Brushing resistance is one of the most common things parents raise at our Noblesville office, and it usually has less to do with the...
At some point your child grabs the toothbrush and makes it clear they intend to handle this themselves. The question is whether letting them is a milestone or a gamble, and the honest answer is that it depends on the child rather than on the birthday. There is no age...
Parents rarely think of a prescription as a sugar exposure. It comes from a pharmacy, it treats something real, and it goes in a measuring syringe rather than a snack cup. But many liquid medications made for children are sweetened, and a fair number are acidic, and...
Gummy vitamins solved a real problem. Getting a child to swallow a chalky tablet is a daily negotiation, and a chewable fruit-flavored version ends the argument. Parents who switched are not being careless, they found something that worked. The dental question is...
A sippy cup travels well. It rides in the car, sits in the stroller, comes to the park, and gets refilled without much thought. That convenience is exactly why it works, and it is also the reason the cup ends up mattering to your toddler’s teeth in a way that a...
Somewhere around six months, a first tooth appears, and a question that never came up before suddenly does. Parents search it, get contradictory answers, and arrive at our Noblesville office genuinely unsure whether they are doing something harmful. Some have already...
