Summer can be a grand time of great adventures, especially for kids. Longer days and no school leaves plenty of time for activities and even time to just play with friends. But summer can also be a difficult time to maintain good oral hygiene. Here are 3 reasons why summer can be hard on kid’s teeth and how to fix it.
Lack of Routine
During the school year, kids generally tend to have a pretty standard routine. They generally are home during the week and generally go to bed at roughly the same time. This makes it easier to develop a standard routine that includes brushing their teeth. Summer is full of nighttime activities that make it difficult to keep to a routine. In addition, many kids fall asleep on the way home from evening activities or are too tired at the end of a long day to remember to brush teeth. You can help prevent this by making brushing their teeth such in ingrained habit during the rest of the year that they almost can’t sleep without brushing their teeth.
More Sugar
For kids, summers are a vacation and just like when adults go on vacation, dietary habits generally loosen. This means more sugary snacks and foods combined with less regular brushing of their teeth. There are a few ways to help decrease the damage that sugar does to tooth enamel. The first is to have kids rinse their mouths out thoroughly with plain water and spit it out. The other way is to feed them lots of apples. Apples contain pectin which is mildly acidic, in addition to being crunchy. Between the pectin and the crunch, apples do a pretty decent job of cleaning your teeth between brushes.
More Traveling
Whether it is vacationing in a different city, campouts or even just sleepovers with friends, kids are much more mobile during the summer. This makes it difficult to remember to take a toothbrush with them wherever they go. Thankfully, there are single-use disposable toothbrushes available that put an end to this problem. Just stock up on them at the beginning of summer and store a few in all backpacks, bags, purses, and suitcases as well as a few in the car.
While summer is only a few months out of the year, it is still an important time to practice good oral hygiene. Maybe even more so because of the higher number of sugary snacks and sweets kids may consume. Just take some basic precautions, including routine dental care, and you can help your kids take just as good care of their teeth in the summer as they do the rest of the year.