4 Reasons You Should Protect Your Child's Primary Teeth

If you are a new parent, then you may wonder why you should protect a child's primary, or baby, teeth from cavities and decay, even though they will eventually be replaced with adult teeth. While these teeth may only stay in your child's mouth for a few years before adult teeth replace them, they serve several important purposes.

Learn about four three little-known reasons you should protect the integrity of your child's primary teeth just as you would their permanent ones.

Of course, baby teeth are smaller than adult teeth since a child's mouth is much smaller than an adult's. A typical child also only has 20 baby teeth, while about 32 permanent teeth eventually erupt.

However, these are not the only ways that that primary teeth differ from adult teeth. Baby teeth also have much thinner enamel than adult teeth, leading to a child's primary teeth being much more fragile than their permanent counterparts are.

For this reason, just a small area of decay in a baby tooth can turn into a large cavity that penetrates right into the tooth pulp very quickly. Once primary tooth decay reaches the pulp of the tooth, it can cause your child to experience intense pain. The only option at this point is to extract the tooth.

Extracting a primary tooth early may not sound like a big disadvantage when all primary teeth eventually fall out. However, extracting a baby tooth can cause problems with adjacent baby teeth and the adult teeth that will eventually replace the extracted tooth.

The teeth adjacent to the extracted tooth may shift and block the site where an adult tooth is meant to erupt. This can lead to the adult tooth impacting or erupting in front of or behind the shifted teeth. Both problems can lead to the need for orthodontic treatment later in life.

The natural loss of baby teeth over time typically does not lead to speech problems in children. Most primary teeth lost naturally are quickly replaced with adult teeth, since primary teeth are usually pushed out of place by the permanent teeth replacing them.

If yours needs to have several baby teeth extracted early, then this could cause a speech problem, especially if adult teeth do not replace them for a long period. This is because many consonant sounds are from placing the tongue strategically against certain teeth.

Thankfully, many of the hazards of extracting a primary tooth early are avoidable by placing a space maintainer in a child's mouth. One of these dental devices can keep adjacent teeth from drifting into the space from the extracted primary tooth to help the permanent tooth underneath it erupt properly.

Two types of pediatric space maintainers exist: fixed and removable. Fixed maintainers attach to the teeth with a dental bonding material and are adjacent to the gap from when a primary tooth is extracted early. A removable maintainer temporarily anchors to these teeth and is removable when your child brushes their teeth.

While these devices are useful and can often help problems with permanent teeth that more expensive orthodontic care would need to correct in the future, in rare cases, they can break, irritate your child's mouth, or affect jaw growth. In addition, young children are prone to removing their removable space maintainers and losing them.

A child's primary teeth serve more purposes than many parents realize. Keep these facts in mind next time you are tempted to allow your child to slack off on at-home dental care or skip their next dental appointment. Contact the staff at Eastland Dental Center and Professional Dental Center to schedule your child's next dental check-up today.