Bringing your child to the dentist can be hard, I mean really hard. A trip to the dentist can invite overwhelming fear for children and teens, lead to noncompliance with treatment, and evoke high levels of stress for everyone involved. So how can we make dental appointments easier?
I’m a Certified Child Life Specialist (CCLS), a pediatric psychosocial professional, and I’ve worked in hospitals with children and families to minimize their risk of developing negative psychosocial impacts in the midst of difficult medical procedures and heavy emotional experiences.
Here we’ll talk about how you can promote positive coping in your child who is fearful of the dentist, empower them, and advocate for them while navigating through anticipated stressful appointments.
Assessing The Situation
The way you prepare your child depends on various factors like where they’re at developmentally, what their past medical experiences have been like, and how they typically cope.
Things to Consider
- Will any part of this experience be brand-new to them?
- Are there any particular parts of past negative dental experiences that felt extra hard? Common times of increased distress include; when any staff member enters the room, the noise of a certain tool, having mouth props or bite blocks in, the chair reclining, putting on protective eyewear, and being told not to move.
- Do they tend to be an information seeker or avoider? Children who restrict their thoughts and deny their worries may cope best by detaching from stressful stimuli. Providing distraction or encouraging them to squeeze a favorite stuffed animal might be helpful. Children who remain alert to stressful stimuli may want to know more detailed information about procedures and their purposes. Narrating procedural steps and highlighting sensory experiences could be helpful.
Preparing Your Child
Preparation is about normalization. How can we make this unknown, scary experience, more familiar and less threatening? The answer is often through play. esensitize our children to noises a great way to connect with your child and evaluate their needs. It is helpful in determining where fear might be coming from, and which coping strategies could help
Advocating
- Partner with Your Provider
- Ask to speak to the healthcare team about your child's needs. See if they can give you a step-by-step process, or if they have a walkthrough video available.
- Request a tour of the office. A tour allows your child to get familiar with the space, the staff, and (if able) the equipment and materials. Introducing this information in a less threatening way can help normalize the experience at the appointment.
- Don’t be afraid to ask questions or make requests. You deserve to know how to best prepare your child.
Giving Information
As the expert on your child, you can decide what information might be helpful for them to know and what parts would only cause them more worry.
- Sensory Experiences
- Exposing your child to the different sensations they might experience can be an effective way to desensitize and familiarize them with the equipment.
- This might look like using your fingers to massage their gums, having them try on sunglasses during play, or using a toy water squirter inside their mouth.
- When you describe a sensation, ask them if they want to see what it feels like now. If they aren’t ready for that, you can ask them if you can demonstrate it on their figurine or stuffed animal, or even on yourself. When we create more distance from a stressful stimulus, it can feel less threatening.
- Order and Purpose of Procedural Steps
- Providing sequential information about the procedural steps and sensations expected can reduce stress and anxiety about the unknown, but it could also enhance your child’s worries. It’s important to choose what information you will or will not give, and recurrently assess your child’s emotional state for changes.
- Nonthreatening Ways to Introduce Information
- pictures / illustrations / diagrams
- stories, books, songs
- playdoh / art
- dental play
- How They Might Cope
- S
- s
- Consider Your Language
- dsf
- ds
