Proper dental hygiene is an essential part of teaching your children to take good care of their bodies, and as always, it's very important to help them to be able to feel as much of a full participant as you can in terms of choosing what kind of toothbrush that they want, choosing the type of toothpaste. You do want to make sure that you use a children's toothpaste, some of the adult toothpastes are very, very strong and not appropriate because children do sometimes swallow tiny bits of them. When your children are younger, particularly maybe age five, six, or younger, you want to make sure that you do a good, thorough once over of their teeth and then let them brush, and I've pretty much have always done that with my kids and it helps them to feel like they are doing something but I'm also making sure that I'm getting all of the spots at least once. So, this is an example of a children's toothbrush, this is autumn?s, and I also have some floss over here, it's pretty difficult for an adult to try to floss a child's teeth with just the regular floss because their mouths are so small. They do sell instruments that have bits of floss on them that the children can use, or you can use with them, it's a little bit easier and so I do recommend getting them into the habit of flossing, at least usually once a day, maybe in the evening, brushing twice, two to three times a day. Another important component that people sometimes forget about is doing some sort of a fluoride rinse. Now some of you may have fluoride in your water already, so at least they are getting it in that form, we don't, we happen to have well water, so we, at the recommendation of our dentist, purchased this fluoride rinse, and what this rinse does is it actually helps to strengthen the teeth, well the teeth that are already in their mouth that you can see, want to smile, and it also helps to strengthen the adult teeth which have not came down yet, because they're going to need the fluoride to get strong. So, they do this rinse, and this is a nice type of rinse because it actually has a light that lights up, and it lights for about a minute so they can watch it and they can know when it's time to stop, and of course, to spit out the rinse. And with the teeth brushing we really try to have them do something like hum Happy Birthday twice while they're brushing so that they know that they've been brushing for a long enough time to have done a thorough job. You also want to make sure that you find a kid friendly dentist so that their trips to the dentist are positive and that they're not having some bad experiences that are going to make them want to avoid going to the dentist when they get older. And I've also discovered several websites that are geared towards children and dental hygiene that have puzzles and games and things like that, again, anything that you can do to get your children involved in that process and so that they're going to be starting the foundation of a life long healthy habit of taking care of their teeth and gums.
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