See How to Make Your Child’s Visit Productive
During a child’s first dental visit, the parent can experience with their child. The child will come in, the staff, actually our clinical staff, the assistants are the ones that do the kids. They bring them in first. I come in and do the exam later on, but kind of show them around a little bit, show them what the chair is. Some kids, if you throw them in a chair right away, they’re like, “What’s going on here?” so we don’t do that. We just kind of introduce them, show them around the room a little bit, get them in the chair, just introduce things to them in their own language, like the suction that we use to suck out their mouth, we’ll call it Mr. Thirsty, things like that, just kind of put it on their level.
We don’t force anything on anybody. That’s the last thing you want to do because you don’t want to give somebody a bad experience. Again, what I mentioned before is that we try to get, if it’s a parent that’s in the practice and they’ve had a child, and we try and get them to bring them in with them to let them just see that this is just not a threatening environment at all. It’s always, with kids, it’s always a tell-show-do type of thing. You tell them what you’re going to do, you show them—for instance, when we’re going to polish their teeth, we’ll tell them, “Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to rub this little rubber cup around on your tooth, and here’s what it’s going to feel like.” You just put it on their thumb and you just rub it on their thumb and they’re, “Okay, that’s not so bad.” Then, you do it. That’s how that works with kids.