There are a million ways to demonstrate the proper time it takes to brush our kid’s teeth. In our house, brushing our teeth is a kids-only activity because we are usually putting our kids down to sleep before we are going to sleep ourselves. That presents my wife and I with a fun, sometimes challenging, opportunity to focus on both the transition and the actual act of brushing those little teeth.
Right now, we have a 4.5-year-old and a 6-year-old, and each of them is at their own “stage” of development. To give you a glimpse into the way they act, the “stage” they are on is often determined by a weekday vs weekend schedule, how much they like their toothpaste at the time, and if their electric toothbrush is properly charged. Over the years, they might not have been on much of a stage at all as we did things differently and were mostly doing whatever it took to get the job done.
Dr. Sonam Shah is our children’s pediatric dentist in South Charlotte and Fort Mill, and an amazing one at that! She is board-certified and went to school longer for her dental specialty. On the topic of kids and their dental hygiene, another unique fact about her background on the subject of cleaning teeth is that before she went to her 4-year dental program, she went to dental hygiene school! With all of that education, she always manages to simplify things for me and on this past visit, she leaned in to remind me of one thing that really stuck. The time it takes to brush your child’s teeth is not just about the time required to get a toothbrush in and spread the toothpaste around, but more importantly, the time it takes to properly clean all surfaces of the teeth.
Logically, I knew there were multiple surfaces on the tooth and that it would take some time to get them clean, but I can’t help the fact that even when I’m cleaning my own teeth I sometimes feel it is more important to brush my front teeth, the ones that everyone sees, more than the others.
“At birth people usually have 20 baby (primary) teeth, which start to come in (erupt) at about 6 months of age. They fall out (shed) at various times throughout childhood. By age 21, all 32 of the permanent teeth have usually erupted.” – The ADA
Following the logic I started to mention above, mixed in with the 20 baby teeth the ADA says most kids have, even taking 3 seconds per tooth takes 60 seconds! That’s a whole minute of brushing! After failing to get all of the surfaces of those little teeth cleaned in less time, I realized we were going to need something to get the kids to stay still long enough to let me do my job. For that sake, we came up with a song when they were very young that has evolved into something different today.
The song we sang when the kids were teeny munchkins was, “This is the toothbrush song, it isn’t very looong and it goes Ahh Ahh Ahh Ahh Ahh Ahh Ahh Ahh, E E E E E E E E, eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh
This is the toothbrush song, it isn’t very looong | 10 seconds 8x Ahh’s | 10 seconds | This is when we clean the top of the teeth on the bottom arch 8x E’s | 10 seconds | This is when we clean the front of the teeth 8x eh’s | 10 seconds | This is when we clean the lingual side of the teeth (back of teeth)
We would sing this song twice in order to make sure we were brushing for 60+ seconds. We also listened to the timer on the electric toothbrush.
Then, as the kids got older, we found other songs that were exciting and distracting from the actual act of brushing. It’s as complicated to get the kids to wash their hands before dinner but we have a lot more to negotiate with on the way to the dinner table.
We have a special bond with our kids that we want to have fun with and use to create memories even in the most mundane of daily chores. It’s for that reason that we turned brushing into an activity that our children (mostly) don’t mind, and the same reason we explore ways to get our kids to learn more about something they are going to continue to do the rest of their lives.
