The cute face of your little ones adorned with a heart melting innocent smile jewelled with couple of rabbit teeth popping out vibrating their happiness makes our life even more worthy of living. I am sure this sentence would have flashed a favourite memory of your kid’s smile in front of your eyes. At times, something we take for granted in the entire equation are those lovely cute teeth.  As parents we try to provide the best possible care for the overall health and well being of our little munchkins including their oral health. But what if even after taking all the care and precautions, you find problem with your kids teeth? Well I can assure you that it is a terrible feeling because I am speaking out of my first hand experience as a mother. And I decided to pen this blog down to make sure no one else has to go through this.

I am not breaking new ground by stating that breastfeeding is the best gift that a mother can give to her child, and I followed the same mantra for my kid as well. I never gave him bottle and used sipper or glass for giving him water or any other liquid. I breastfed my son for almost 21 months until he gave it up by himself. Even post that I never gave bottle when I introduced cow milk for him, instead made him drink directly from glass.

I always used to think that by breastfeeding I was providing him with the golden milk that will help him keep any health issue at bay. Well I was not completely wrong on that but yes there came a shock when he turned two. After we celebrated his second birthday, we noticed a part of his tooth chipped away. At first we were not able to understand what really happened. We were under the impression that may be part of his tooth got chipped due to a bad fall, but then we soon noticed similar pattern in his other tooth as well. That did ring a bell and we consulted a dentist. We were told it was tooth decay and that certain procedure needs to be followed for the same. Terms like root canal, cavity, filling, extraction etc. were used which scared us like hell and we could not gain the courage of letting him go through all this as he was too young to even understand what was happening. And to make it worse, we were told that the cause of decay was breastmilk. This was difficult for me to internalise. Hence, we dropped the idea of going to the dentist. Instead, we turned to the digital messiah, “Doctor Google” and started looking for some home remedies to control the tooth decay. You will not believe but we tried everything that we came across to stop the decay. Be it using clove oil or baking soda or alum water or applying turmeric powder or rinsing with salt water. Following all these remedies did somewhat slow down the decay process, but did not stop it. By the time he was four years old, we started seeing cavity and so we made up our mind that we need to have a second go at the dental treatment.

While searching for the best dentists in Hyderabad, we came across Dr Srinivas Namineni in Rainbow Hospital, Hyderabad and we decided to visit him. But as soon as we made up our mind, came the unexpected. The most weird year of our lifetime “March 2020” when all of us got imprisoned in a complete lockdown due to pandemic. Meanwhile, during this lockdown the home remedies that we followed as a ritual prevented him from getting any infection or pain but the cavity was there which spoiled one tooth of his completely. So February 2021 we finally took the appointment and went to see Dr Srinivas. One thing that I would  like to say about him is that he was very calm and friendly with my son and explained us everything in detail which gave us the confidence to go ahead with the extraction procedure.

While having a conversation he explained us several reasons that could have caused the dental issue for my son. While I will be taking up some of the other reasons mentioned by Dr. Srinivas in my next blog. In this blog I will tell you the one which struck a chord with me and perfectly explained the root cause of the tooth decay for my son. And the reason was breastfeeding. Yes, I agreed this time, because the reason was not the “breastmilk” but it was the “breastfeeding”. To simplify it further for you, it is not the breastmilk that causes the problem but it is the way in which we breastfeed may become the issue. As the doctor explained, that breastfeeding while lying down is a strict no no after the teeth erupts and generally the catalyst in triggering the tooth decay in toddlers. He further explained that once the kid is a year old, we should avoid breastfeeding at night (specially while lying down) as then it becomes more of a comfort feeding. This way the milk compound gets stuck in the teeth which causes dental problems. 

One other big takeaway from the conversation was, like any other vaccines, dental consultation for a six month old is a must. This helps in understanding the do’s and don’t for the overall oral health and hygiene and the necessary steps that should be taken when the child starts having the milk teeth. It helps us being better prepared to take care of their oral health. 

To keep the cute adorable smiles of your young ones adorned with the white jewels, make sure to consult a dentist at a regular cadence as advised and my advise would be to start this early.

Keep watching out in this space for my next blog in this series on dental health for kids.

Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu..