Visit to dentist

We went for our 6mthly dentist check up yesterday. My son was very good at the dentist and that made me very happy. He looked a bit nervous but wasn’t scared. That’s despite having seen my helper being terrified when she had her tooth extracted a month ago.


I didn’t have to hold his hand or distract him. I just sat him down in the dentist chair. Then the dentist told him that he would take a look in his mouth and clean his teeth. Dentist was happy with his teeth. The decay on one of his front teeth has stopped, and the surface has hardened. Just some plaque and no other cavities.

Tooth Attrition

Over the past 6 mths his top front teeth (incisors) were getting shorter and smaller. Well, the top front ones were the most obvious to me but I’m guessing the attrition was occurring to all his teeth. Initially I thought I was imagining it, but the rate of attrition was rather fast this year. So when my husband and previous helper commented on it too, I had to do something. I checked it out on the internet and consulted the dentist over the phone. He recommended I use a tooth mousse. It is a paste that I rub over his teeth. It contains liquid calcium. It’s pricey but I’m so relieved that it has arrested the attrition.

The dentist explained that the attrition was due to many factors.

1. His oral muscles are impaired. So he is unable to get rid of bits of food left behind in his mouth by moving his tongue. He doesn’t talk as much as a normal person, so that too meant there’s more bits of food left behind.

2. It was very easy for him to vomit in his earlier years. That then brings up the acid which corrodes his teeth.

3. He couldn’t spit (until about a month ago). So even though I was brushing his teeth, bits of food were not expelled from his mouth.

4. I was not using a fluoride toothpaste until about a year ago. Flouride helps protect the teeth. He said it was ok to use just a smudge of children’s fluoride toothpaste, given his many risk factors.

5. He drank lots of Pediasure milk, which is very much sweeter than other milk powders. We gradually cut down on his consumption of milk as he improved on eating solids. Pediasure has been clinically proven to help picky eaters etc catch up in their growth. He still needs to be on Pediasure because though he can eat solid, he eats a very tiny amount (50-75% less) compared to his peers.

6. I didn’t start brushing his teeth regularly until he was about two and a half years old. He had oral defensiveness so it was very difficult to get into his mouth. We hardly wiped his face

7. Bruxism - that’s the term for teeth grinding. He used to grind his teeth a lot in his earlier years. That has thankfully reduced though it does still happen. His CST therapist says he does it to relieve the tension in his oral muscles. His mouth tends to hang open which produces tension in some oral muscles. I noticed that it sometimes also happens when he’s stressed – e.g. when he started schooling; when there were changes to his routine before the old helper left; and even when he’s writing! I tell him to relax when I notice it. Lately, he is able to stop grinding when I prompt him to.

8. I read that saliva protects the teeth to some extent. Since his mouth tends to hang open, his top teeth aren’t coated with saliva the way it would when the mouth is closed. Perhaps that explains why his bottom teeth didn’t corrode as much.

I'm so glad that the tooth mousse did the trick cos I was worried my son's front teeth might have ended up like the photo below!