A Child's First Dental Visit
Why the best first appointment achieves nothing
Parents often apologise to me for a first appointment where nothing happened. They should not. A first visit where nothing happens is usually the most valuable appointment in a child's entire dental history.
What the first visit is for
It is for the child to decide that this room is fine.
That is the whole objective. They ride the chair up and down, hold the little mirror, watch the light move, and let me count their teeth if they want to. If they do not want to, we do not. There is no drill, no needle and nothing that has to be endured.
A child who has been held still for a procedure has learned something about dental clinics that takes years to unlearn.
Children who go through that introduction come back for the second appointment willingly. Everything clinical that follows is straightforward, because they are not braced against it.
When to come
By the first birthday, or within six months of the first tooth. At that age the appointment is largely for the parent — brushing, diet, what to expect from teething — but it establishes the pattern early, which is most of the point.
What parents can do
- Do not promise it will not hurt. If anything ever does, you have spent your credibility. "They are going to count your teeth" is both true and sufficient.
- Avoid the vocabulary. Needle, drill, pain, brave. Children who have never heard those words in this context do not bring the association with them.
- Do not pass on your own history. This is the hard one. Children read adult anxiety with great accuracy, and a parent who is tense in the waiting room communicates more than anything said in the surgery.
- Book it for the morning. Tired children, at the end of a school day, are not being difficult. They are tired.
If it has already gone wrong
Quite a few of the children I see have had a bad experience somewhere else, and arrive having decided the matter. That is entirely recoverable, but it is recovered slowly.
We book longer appointments, we start again from the introduction stage regardless of age, and we accept that the first two or three visits may achieve very little on paper. It is time well spent. The alternative is an adult who avoids dentistry for twenty years and arrives at forty with a problem that would have been nothing at eight.
