Dentistry for adults and Dentistry for children do have loads of commonalities such as teeth, habits, anxiety, fillings, cavities, sugar intake, root canals, extractions, etc. In addition, another main commonality is the materials and techniques used in both cases.
So what’s different?
Pediatric dentistry is one of the streams of specialities that one may choose at the end of Bachelors in Dentistry. The entire tenure of study for becoming a pediatric Dentist is about three years. One of the major components of our course contents is Child psychology, understanding behavior, handling behavior and various types of behavior management. Most of the dentists might have parental knowledge and a natural instinct for treating a young child, but they are not qualified with the science that helps to understand behavior and their occurences in depth.
Behavior management techniques are multiple and many. They can be cross connected in order to create custom made behavior management recipe for a a particular case and child.
Some of the commonly used techniques of behavior management by pediatric dentists are:
Tell show do
Acclimitization
Slow approach
Reassuring the child
Modeling from another child or sibling
Neurolinguistic programming
Hypnosis
Rewards
Distractions
Stories, metaphors
Conscious sedation
general anaesthesia
All of these techniques can be used in various permutations and combinations in order to get the right result and at the same time making sure that child carries positive dental attitude for life time.
Some times fear is situation, person or place related. At many other times, its deep seated without any surface causes. Its in these scenario that we cannot figure out the cause. Of course its helpful to understand the cause leading to the fear. Many a times, young children can express very well, follow all the instructions and thereby succeed all the steps of the first appointment.
Overcoming apprehension, introducing dentistry as a fun game, explaining all the tools that can be used during the procedure are indeed well documented. These techniques help us to get better cooperation from the child in concern.
Since all of the above are not really the vital component in adult oriented dentistry, its better then to chose the appropriate specialist
