The Tribune

By Dr Sparkman Ferguson

Are you a parent with school children? If so, you already know that the summer months usher in the back-to-school mode. In many households there is the usual summer checklist with last-minute vacations, new uniforms, and new classroom utensils. What is usually missing from this checklist is the child’s (before school) medical and dental visits. Although I am an advocate for total health, I will leave the medical matters for the physicians to comment on.

I am a long-time believer that although well-meaning, an uninformed parent/guardian is the greatest threat to a child’s dental health. Long gone are the days when a parent could easily say, “I just did not know.” We now live in the information age” and there is the expectation that if you are raising children in a modern world that you should also know how to care for them.

What does every school age child need in terms of dental care? Answer: Two important things. Every school age child needs a parent/guardian that is knowledgeable of a child’s dental needs. After all, a child does not make health decisions. This parent then needs to be aware of the current dental health trends for children and be willing to seek essential services for the child.

The first essential service is the dental prophylaxis (called dental cleaning) with fluoride treatment. This is an important routine to develop from the age of four and continue every six months. The fluoride treatment hardens tooth enamel and makes teeth resistant to rotting. The second essential service is the placement of dental sealants in all the back teeth. A dental sealant is a hard plastic coat placed in the grooves of the biting surface of the back teeth. Dental sealants block the caries process (rotting) from attacking the back teeth.

With these essential dental services completed in August, parents can be reasonably assured that the school term will not be interrupted with dental concerns.

No dental health article about school children would be complete without mentioning food and drink. Refined sugar is a huge culprit in the food and drinks of school children. Almost every drink is full of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener. Parents need to choose carefully what a child consumes at home and monitor what they are consuming at school, especially their snacks. “Junk foods” and drinks are tasty but never good for a developing child. In this regard, parents need to be in control of what their child can acquire at school. This is a hard task when most school vendors sell junk foods and drinks, and the child can acquire these items when they are away from their parents. This is a difficult problem to solve, and since sugar consumption is likely to occur, parents then need to protect their children’s teeth in other ways.

Having said all this, there is no easy path to controlling all these factors. However, parents can give their children the ultimate coverage by seeing to their regular professional dental examinations.