Can you help parents choose a toothpaste for their child?
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1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient
2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer
3. Quick Wrap-up
Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.
Counselling Conundrum: "My child just turned three, and I heard I should be using special toothpaste. Which one should I use?"
Concise Conclusion: Before the age of three, children generally don't need fluoride in their toothpaste (unless recommended by their dentist), so you can use "baby toothpaste" which is just a mild a cleanser, or simply water with the toothbrush. Once they turn three, you should start using a pea-sized amount of fluoride toothpaste marked "for kids" (they contain less fluoride than toothpastes for adults) and ensure they learn to spit out the toothpaste and not swallow it.
Quick Wrap-up: Keep in mind, whether drinking water is fluoridated impacts this recommendation. In Canada, most communities have fluoride in the drinking water, but in many places in the United States they do not, and therefore the recommendation is to start when the first tooth appears. Take this chance to remind parents that fluorosis (white blotches on teeth) is caused by too much fluoride, which is why it must not be swallowed.
Dive Deeper
We hope you have found this useful. A reply to this email with any feedback or topic suggestion you may have would be greatly appreciated. Your input will be the key to making this newsletter the best it can be.
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