Braces For Children
Are You Considering Braces for Your Children?
You want to give your children the best start in life, and are conscientious of their health and emotional well-being. Your child’s oral health is an important part of this overall well-being. Making sure they receive proper orthodontic care by an orthodontic specialist either with braces for children or other customized treatments, can give your children the amazing gift of a healthy, natural-looking smile.
Early treatment allows your orthodontist to:
- Correct and guide the growth of your child’s jaw
- Regulate the width of the upper and lower arches
- Create more space for crowded teeth
- Avoid the need for permanent tooth extractions later in life
- Correct thumb sucking and help improve minor speech problems
The American & Canadian Association of Orthodontists recommend that your first visit to the orthodontist occur around age seven.
For parents, it's not always easy to know if your child may need orthodontic treatment.
Trust Us with Your Family’s Smiles – Schedule a FREE Consultation
When you undertake treatment at Floreani, O’Toole & Dool Orthodontists for your child, you can be sure that they will be treated with kindness and dedication, as part of the STRAIGHTSMILE family.
Please contact our office to schedule an appointment for an orthodontic evaluation. Early treatment now will give your child a healthy, beautiful smile for the future.
When do we recommend early treatment?
At our office, we only recommend treatment if there is a significant benefit to your child’s dental development and jaw growth. Sometimes our recommendations are only for extraction of some primary “baby” teeth by your family dentist to help create space, close space, or correct the eruption of an underlying permanent tooth. This can be extremely powerful and can prevent significant problems if left undetected or untreated.
Please contact our office to schedule a free orthodontic evaluation for your child. Remember, early orthodontic treatment and other interceptive recommendations, though not commonly needed, may be a window of opportunity to help improve both tooth eruption and the growth of your child’s jaws. We also specialize in braces for children.
What to look for
Here are a few things to look for that may mean your child needs to see an orthodontist:
- Early or late loss of baby teeth
- Early loss of adult teeth
- Crossbite (anterior and posterior)
- Submerging teeth
- Impacted teeth or teeth that are blocked out
- Congenitally missing teeth
- Supernumerary or “extra” teeth
- Open bites
- Thumb or finger sucking
- Speech difficulties
- Biting the cheek/roof of the mouth
- Teeth that stick out too far
- Underbite
- Facial imbalance
- Facial/Dental Trauma
- Difficulty in chewing and biting
- Jaws that shift or make a sound
- Grinding or clenching of the teeth
- Any & all dental anomalies
What does early orthodontic treatment involve?
Floreani, O’Toole & Dool Orthodontists is your local community orthodontic office that specializes in the assessment and correction of your child’s jaw growth. That doesn’t mean that every child that walks into our office requires early treatment.
During early orthodontic treatment we often use appliances like:
- palatal expanders
- partial braces
- growth modification appliances
A short course of treatment ranging from 4 to 10 months is typically all that is needed to restore more appropriate development of the face and jaw bones, or create space to alleviate crowded teeth. Afterwards, we will monitor your child’s dental and facial development for a couple of years to ensure that the teeth continue to erupt properly.