Being a parent, I try my best to teach my children life skills, one of them being – ‘Brush your teeth!’ We all know the importance of hygiene. So why is it so painfully difficult to get your kids to brush their teeth?

My parents were always sternly commanding my siblings and I to brush our teeth. We tried our best to avoid the brushing, with our defense progressing through several steps. We thought it tricky to start with just wetting our brushes, which did not work because our parents responded by smelling them. We thought we were smart to put a dab of the awful paste on our brushes, only to have our parents smell our teeth.

Our final brilliant step was to dab the pasted brushes on our teeth. We thought we had the answer, only to have our parents smell our breath. We hadn’t known that this was the last step and were quite surprised when one of our parents would stand behind us making sure we each brushed correctly and completely. They made us cover all the bristles with toothpaste. Yech!

As a parent I was cognizant of the anti-brushing schemes and thwarted my children’s attempts to avoid the ‘distasteful’ experience. I let them try a couple of the old tricks, making them moan when found out. Then I just stood behind them at the sink, making sure their brushes were fully covered with paste and thoroughly used.

Funny thing – it turns out I was making the kids use too much toothpaste. Research reported on by Science News found that too much paste can hurt teeth:

“Based on a review of the science led by J. Tim Wright, a pediatric dentist at the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry in Chapel Hill, the ADA now recommends that children’s teeth should be brushed with a smear of fluoride toothpaste as soon as they appear. The new recommendations also change the advice for older kids: Children should keep using a smear — not the pea-sized amount previously recommended — until their third birthday. Children between ages 3 and 6 should use a pea-sized amount of fluoride toothpaste.”

“Fluoride works to prevent cavities by rebuilding teeth. Highly reactive fluoride sticks to molecules in the tooth that become exposed when bacteria-produced acid attacks the teeth. Fluoride molecules latch on to the tooth and beckon other minerals such as calcium and phosphate in a process called remineralization.”

Fluoride really can stain! My wife and I had decided we would require the kids to routinely use fluoride rinse as part of their brushing regimen. We were aghast and ashamed when our daughter’s adult teeth came in with permanent stains from the fluoride rinse.

When supervising you children’s toothbrushing please keep in mind that fluoride rinse is good at preventing cavities but, as with most products, should be used as directed.