The enamel on baby teeth when you compare them to adult teeth is a lot thinner than it is for adult teeth. What does that mean? When you get decay on baby teeth it travels a lot faster through the tooth than it would on an adult tooth. Great! Because you know how kids are when they are eating and snacking which they love to snack and they love to have frequent meals and snacks throughout the day. They also love all of the sweet stuff, which again kind of predisposes you to having more cavities. So home care and reinforcing good home care with your children is very, very important. Especially at an early age. Good eating habits like less snacking or less frequent snacking throughout the day is kind of the ideal situation. Not drinking juice is an ideal situation. Again, you don’t want to be sipping juice throughout the day. Every exposure from juice will increase your risk for getting decay or getting cavities on the teeth. But again, what purpose do baby teeth serve throughout your lifetime? As you learning to chew, learning to eat they serve a good purpose in that respect. But they actually hold the space for the adult tooth that are…the adult teeth that are going to replace them later in your life. So let’s say you get a big cavity on a baby tooth and it for whatever reason needs to be removed. If that happens earlier than the adult tooth is ready to come in a lot of times you’ll actually get very a quick collapse of space in the area.

So I have a dental model here, kind of showing a loss of space. I don’t know if you can see it here very well. But, basically, let’s say you lost this baby tooth prematurely or too early. Well now the adult tooth doesn’t have as much space to come in. So it might come in a different position than it would have normally if there was a baby tooth to hold the space for it. Sometimes with the patterns of eruption, it might come a little farther forward or a little farther inward by the tongue, or crooked, or sideways. But basically, saving the baby teeth or keeping the baby teeth as long as possible really just does set you up better off in the long term. If there’s anything we can do to keep the baby tooth, it keeps the space for the adult tooth, long story short.  

Alternatively, let’s say you know what, we couldn’t keep the baby tooth, that’s fine. Another thing that we’ll do is insert an appliance like a space maintainer to help keep that space for that adult tooth until it’s ready to come in. So you don’t have as much crowding and you don’t have as much issues with spacing. So, again, another good reason to try to keep your baby teeth. But also it serves as a good first trial run before you get your adult teeth in that are to last you the rest of your lifetime.

So, hopefully that was helpful and informative for you guys thanks for listening!