Children & Bad Breath, Part II

When is the best time to take your child to the dentist? According to parents, it's winter. This is a time when the child has gotten used to his or her school routine. Many parents agree, according to a survey done by a dental care advocacy group, Oral Health America. Their survey showed that 63 percent of parents feel that taking their children to the dentist close to the beginning of the academic school year is either extremely or very important. This is a way to get kids ready to go back to school with a clean bill of dental health, thus avoiding problems such as cavities, bad breath and gum disease. Eighty-nine percent of parents surveyed also believe that regular trips to the dentist are vital to their children's overall good health. The survey conducted by Oral Health America was done as part of the group's Fall for Smiles campaign. It is a campaign that hopes to connect communities to resources that can help them improve overall oral health.

Monitoring your child's (or children's) oral health habits and being on the lookout for halitosis-causing illnesses. For older people, dry mouth is fairly common and often leads to bad breath, and as we get older, our production of saliva decreases. However, when bad breath is found in children, the cause is often as simple as not having proper oral care habits -- brushing properly.

Any parent will agree, getting a child to thoroughly brush his or her teeth (or at all) can be quite challenging. As busy as parents are with life in general, often we assume that kids are brushing their teeth when they aren't. Try a brushing schedule for both parent and child where it's a group activity done twice daily. Brushing your teeth together could be fun, and then you can not only check on their little one's method and brushing technique but also serve as an example.