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Your Kid’s First Dental Visit
The First Visit: The Most Important Event
“Bring your child to the dentist when he or she is about a year old.”
During the visit, the dentist will teach you and your partner the ways to clean and care for newly erupted baby teeth, especially after mealtimes. One of the worst things you could do is to allow your infant to sleep with the milk bottle in the mouth. This causes the milk to pool around the gums and teeth, which can lead to serious rampant decay of your toddler’s teeth.
Although this is a treatable condition, it can be very expensive.
“The first dental visit can make or break your child’s attitude towards the dentist.”
Choose a dentist who is adept at handling children. For Dr Lim, the most important thing that he does is to introduce the “strange equipment” in a fun and exciting manner. He lets the child discover the dental chair and how it works, and become familiar with the dental tools he uses.
When your child becomes familiar with the environment and equipment, he or she will usually settle down and begin to enjoy the new experience.
Dr Lim Swee Teck has been peering into mouths almost every day for the past 48 years, polishing teeth, removing plaque and filling in cavities for young and old alike. Through the years, the friendly dentist has built a reputation for himself among his peers for being very good with kids, a child whisperer of sorts.
Dr Lim’s journey began in the early 1960s when he was training to be a dentist. Every Saturday, he would watch as crying children who needed to have their rotten teeth extracted sat on the chair, afraid of what was to come next – a painful orchestra of dental tools that would inevitably leave them with missing teeth and a bleeding mouth.
“How frightening it is for the child! The brain registers all these events and that is how ‘intense fear’ arises in these children. I was so moved by the children’s [plight] that I decided to pursue this area of specialisation,”
Dr Lim enthuses.
Today, the first male in paediatric dentistry has a booming practice and a long list of happy children who look forward to sitting on his comfortable dental chair, a far cry from the picture of crying kids he was faced with almost 50 years ago.
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