Time to call out shit parenting!

It used to take three of us to brush my daughter's teeth: me to brush, my wife to hold her arms down and Mr Tumble to distract her! She's now old enough to be bribed with star stickers.

SEN isn't at all related to this either, there's no excuse for letting a childs teeth rot.

Absolutely. My severely disabled 12-year-old niece has beautiful teeth because my sister has brushed them twice a day, every day, since they first appeared.

Sometimes I have to hold my 2 year old daughter's arms with one hand and brush her teeth. It's not fun, I don't enjoy it, but I'm a fucking parent so I do it.

I'm sorry but poverty isn't an excuse. If you aren't capable of buying a tooth brush you shouldn't be having children.

This is the product of generations families that have kids that don't learn basic skills.

Children whose parents and grandparents didn't learn to clean their teeth either.

Ditto with reading at bedtime, ditto with eating junk food, ditto with not respecting adults, ditto with not bothering with school or learning manners.

@RedHot2025 YANBU!

A boy in reception at my kids school had little brown stumps for teeth as his parents had never made him clean them.

I'm all for shock tactics; showing kids what will happen if they don't clean them.

The cost to the NHS is ridiculous.

As an aside note, my 9 year old has severe tooth decay. His molars and incisors (baby teeth) came through with very little enamel, so just rotted and are falling apart. Nothing we can do other than hope the adult ones are ok. His twin has perfect teeth.

I remember this happening with a friend and his child in the early 2000s, he said his child didn't like, and so refused to drink, water, so had to have juice. My friend is very middle class/ back to nature/camping holidays/all natural organic diet, yet instantly capitulated on any dietary demands the child made, including buying Nestlé cereals which previously he would have never, ever done. He could not deny his child anything.

Do you think that if an expert had come on and said loads of parents are so appalling they aren't teaching their children to brush their teeth it would make any difference to children's dental health? The aim here is to improve dental health in order to save money (and teeth!) down the line. The most reliable way to do that is through professional intervention, which in best case scenario will then be supported by parents. To achieve that you need to get buy in and engagement from parents, which you'll not get from telling them off. There is really no point in putting principle before practicality. We need to deal with what we have, not what we think should be the case.

I don’t believe it’s quite as simple as perfect parents raise children with perfect teeth though.
None of my children have had a filling or an issue with their teeth ever, into adulthood. As small children we didn’t give fizzy drinks or excessive sweets really but definitely once they reached the teen years and got Saturday jobs they’d buy themselves gobstobbers and McDonald’s sodas and all manner of crap.
My sweet neighbour who raised her child on the healthiest diet ever had a nightmare with her little ones teeth, extractions, fillings everything. She was really distressed about it for years. There must be hereditary reasons that some people have weaker teeth too.

@forgotmyusername1 I know a number of schools that have washing machines for this purpose. Also know of Primary schools that offer showers to children that aren’t getting them at home. Feel like we are going back in time

YANBU. My son is 4 and there are 2 kids in his reception class who have cavities.

some schools have washing machines so the kids can have clean clothes

When I worked on a ward, where we'd have children in having rotten teeth removed, the parents would give them juice in bottles after, cans of coke etc.

Some kids were as young as 3 having every single tooth pulled. It was horrid.

But! We were not allowed to say anything to the parents about the sugary drinks etc!! It was awful.

My daughter has a cavity due to her reflux going out of control and she started grinding the refluxed stomach contents into her teeth.
We managed to get an appointment with a new paediatrician who sorted out her meds and get her reflux back under control.
We were pretty good with avoiding sugar and things bad for teeth before but have been extra keen since. She has her teeth brushed to YouTube videos twice a day and extra toothpaste put on her teeth before she goes to sleep to give a bit of protection from her reflux. She has fluoride treatment every 3 months and for the last 18 months the cavity hasn't got any worse and doesn't cause her pain so for now it's just being monitored every 3 months. It's was hard at first to make the adjustments - the removal of citrus fruits she found harder than anything else! She's got a dairy allergy so she's on oat milk and we pay a fortune for the oat milk that has the equivalent nutrition to cows milk.

My daughters school have offered to brush her teeth during the day if needed as they know the issues we have. As it currently stands she doesn't need the extra teeth cleaning and it absolutely would be extra as we would continue with the 3 times a day we already do

We spend a lot more time and energy on keeping her teeth in the best condition we can than my parents ever did. I was born in the 80s mid way through primary school I was regularly drinking tea and coffee with sugar, we never had water only juice, we didn't have fizzy drinks at home except at Christmas but weekly at grandparents, similar for sweets, chocolates and mints. We could eat as much fruit as we wanted. My little sister had a cavity put down to her having several apples a day by the dentist.

Re the £40 million, it sounds a big number but in the words of "more or less" is it a big number? How many extractions is that a year? What proportion of children are effected?
I've looked up the stat on the gov website. For those mentioning other reasons the full stat is £67 million on extractions, £40 million on extractions due to decay. So approximately a third of the extractions done on children are not due to decay. The data is from 2022-2023. Given the long waiting lists for extractions and the lack of dental check ups, is there a Covid effect on the figures? The figures for 2023-2024 would be interesting to see as any lingering effects of 2020-2021 should have less of an impact.

YANBU - this is just a ridiculous situation and parents should be called out for this. Stop the excuses, cut the crap - it’s poor parenting through and through and if you can’t manage to brush your child’s teeth, I’m concerned about their other needs being met.

Absolutely agree that it is not schools place to teach kids to brush their teeth and it is very poor parenting that is to blame. My own parents were a bit slap dash with the teeth brushing and as a result I have terrible teeth (had loads extracted as a child and then of course my adult molars which come through in childhood are full of fillings). It has caused me a LOT of pain over the years and cost a lot of money! I was absolutely determined my kids would not go the same way. Mine are teens now and and find my obsession with teeth cleaning and dental hygiene amusing. When they were little it was just non-negotiable and they knew it, I did it for them and then supervised until they could be trusted to do it properly.
There is NO excuse. Even if its hard in the toddler years, good dental hygiene will save a child a lifetime of pain and problems.

I agree. I have always supervised my children when brushing their teeth and the dentist always remarks what great teeth they have and to make sure I watch them/ brush their teeth until they are much older.

It is also diet - the crap most kids eat daily is appalling. And it’s not even just sweets or fizzy drinks, it’s a cereal and just an overall processed diet lacking in k2 and good animal fats. You can tell by not only the amount of children with cavities but also needing braces and corrective dental treatment because their teeth are growing so misaligned due to poor diet. I recommend all parents with kids and dental issues to research Weston Price’s work on oral health.

Is that £40 million just for tooth decay?

Because DS is going into hospital for teeth extraction because his are impacted and I wondered how much of that figure relates to cases like his. Absolutely nothing to do with dental hygiene in our case.

His cousins had to have several baby teeth removed for decay. SIL tried to claim it was because they had weak enamel. The fact that every time I see these nephews they are chomping on sugary snacks is apparently nothing to do with it 🙄

I've said it many times on here but one of the first thing the coalition government did in 2010 was to cut the funding for the National Healthy Schools Standard. This was a very successful initiative that most schools in the country joined voluntarily and the data showed improvements being made before the funding was pulled. It was a collaboration between education and primary care trusts and included all aspects,food, physical activity, emotional health and the PSHE curriculum. Staff, governors, pupils, parents and health professionals were involved. Some fantastic projects took place such as parenting programmes, growing food and how to cook it and yes, talks from local dentists on how to look after children's teeth.

What else should schools do to compensate for shit parenting? Teach kids to use a toilet, to eat with cutlery, dress themselves, turn the pages of a book, sit on the floor?

These are all things that a significant minority of 4 year olds starting school can’t do because they’ve never been shown how. That’s absolutely shocking. All the wanging on about poverty and deprivation, as if the U.K. has a uniquely poor population, doesn’t help the useless parents or the deprived children. It isn’t the children of refugees who are still in nappies and don’t know what a book is.

Even in the 90s we drank squash at school and squash and some fizzy drinks at home. I don't recall ever going to a friend's house and being given water or milk.

I see some posters have said that a definition of "poor parenting" is subjective and have rolled out mental health problems and poverty as possible excuses.

Poor parenting is not subjective. Poor parenting is having children that are hungry, dirty, sleep deprived, not toilet trained and have never had any discipline.

That's poor parenting. Anyone who thinks it isn't is wrong.

If your mental health problems or "poverty" is so bad bad that you can't do these things then you are not fit to have a child in your care. The child's right to a life where they are fed, clean, rested, toilet trained and able to respond to discipline far far outweighs your right to be a parent.

Harsh but true.

I totally agree, as a society we are reluctant to blame poor parenting.

But also quick to blame teachers, headteachers, friends, social media, literally anything but the crap parents!

I also know a GP who was trained abroad and comes from a poor background in her home country. She 'treats' her toddler son all the time as it's seen as a sign of money and success.

Now that I think about it, most people I know from my parents home country also see sugary treats as a sign of having made it here in England.

They just don't see how bad sugar can be and then the problem is compounded when they don't brush their childrens teeth daily.

Not all SEN is the same.

Why don't we do this now?

I grew up in 80s - public information films were around and how I learnt not to play near plyons and how to cross road and why you had to be careful round train tracks.

We used to be really good at them - I've seen US reviews look at some of the old blunt even scary ones. They were apparently very savy getting people just graduating from film schools wanting to make a mark and build a reputation.

We did do some teeth things back in my 80s primary school - we did experiments with putting teeth in cola - and visibly saw how bad it was and I think has some brushing lessons.