5 Ways to Promote Oral Hygiene During National Children’s Dental Health Month

Parents and caregivers can help promote the benefits of ideal oral health to children during National Children’s Dental Health Month, which kicks off February 1. The month-long observance is the perfect time to focus on all things teeth and Dimensions has plenty of ideas on how to teach kids about oral health.

1. SELF-MONITORING

Okay, no one really enjoys chores, but providing a visual chore chart may motivate youngsters to keep up with their oral hygiene. Kids can use stickers to track their progress in order to obtain their goal (brushing twice a day, everyday) and receive their reward.

2. HEALTHY FOOD CHOICES

Help children make good food choices by showing them foods that are good or bad for their teeth. Hand them a magazine and let them cut out images of cookies, oranges, candies, and vegetables before asking them to paste each item in the good and bad for teeth columns.

3. BRUSH, BRUSH, BRUSH

Children should not brush their teeth without help or adult supervision until they can effectively brush their teeth, but that doesn’t mean kids should not learn how to remove plaque. Teach kids how to floss using a piece of string and marshmallows, or hand them a toothbrush with sparkly white paint and ask them to brush a tooth printed on beige construction paper. This activity demonstrates how daily teeth brushing results in healthy, pearly whites.

4. READ

There are several books to help inspire children to brush their teeth using age appropriate methods.

5. EXPERIMENTS

Sometimes getting messy is the best way to get kids excited about cleaning their teeth. Show kids how malicious plaque can be by growing the sticky film in this hands-on experiment. Kids will definitely be motivated to brush their teeth once they see how sugar activates plaque growth, and how quickly it forms.

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