Good Oral Health Is Totally Awesome: Dental Care for Teens By William Stofer on December 23, 2016

As the parent of a teen, you know how difficult it can be to sometimes to convince your child to do the right thing for the right reasons when it comes to their health. There is more pressure than ever for teenagers to be physically fit and to be conscious of their bodies, which has made exercise and healthy eating more popular among young people than ever before (while driving some, unfortunately, to unhealthy extremes). When it comes to general and restorative dentistry and oral health care, however, getting teens interested can still be a tough sell.

This is partly because many teenagers have not really developed a sense of long-term consequence yet. They look in the mirror and see a mouth full of healthy-looking, intact teeth, and they have difficulty imagining a day when those teeth are no longer so strong and radiant. Tooth loss is something that occurs to other people - older people - and not to them.

In providing dental care for teens, the Warsaw, IN cosmetic, general, and restorative dentistry team of Dental Solutions is careful not to talk down to patients, but also to realize that these are patients who are just a few years away from having lost their primary teeth. While they may understand on an intellectual level that they are now in possession of their permanent teeth, the fact that how they treat these teeth during their teenage years will impact their oral health when they are middle-aged and older probably has not fully sunk in yet.

If you have a teenaged son or daughter and you would like to make an appointment on his or her behalf with one of our esteemed dentists, we encourage you to contact Dental Solutions today.

A Healthy Smile Never Goes Out of Style

Many of our current teen patients have been with us since they were small children. They have already developed trusting relationships with us and healthy attitudes toward dental care and their oral health in general. Ideally, this is how teens would be introduced to the dentist, but we understand that this is not often the case.

When new teen patients come to us, we have to build a bridge of trust from scratch. We do this by acknowledging teens as intelligent individuals capable of participating in their own oral health care. Our highly trained team does not condescend to teen patients by trying to make dentistry artificially “cool.” Rather, we talk with them openly and honestly, explaining to them in direct terms how the decisions they make now will influence not only the rest of their lives but even their near futures. When a teen realizes that poor oral health choices could influence the appearance of his or her smile as early as his or her college years, the effect is often profound.

In addition to providing thorough education about oral health care, we offer numerous treatments designed to help teens keep their mouths optimally healthy, from orthodontic and periodontal care to cavity treatments and wisdom tooth extraction.