"Some six year olds have never seen a toothbrush"

[SuperGinger]

Just saw an article on the BBC website about this, very sad you need your teeth for the rest of your life and we are failing our children.

Why aren't they investing in children we are storing up so many problems for the future? Especially with poor diets many children have.

You're so right.

It’s not just teeth. Sometimes I teach children who clearly need glasses but haven’t got them. I will contact home, then pass on to safeguarding, who contact home, but no glasses appear. It is really hard to see children’s education suffering because they need glasses. There are a limited amount of places at the front of classrooms, and these are usually allocated to other children for various reasons. Even when I am able to move students to the front/ print off PPTs for them, sometimes their eyes are so poor they can’t read off the paper or even from the front row.

I do feel schools should be able to do more about this. Eyes should be tested in schools as standard and prescriptions sent home, followed up as neglect if nothing happens within a set amount of time.

Agree that access to dentistry must be improved but due to lack of availability and then covid, my dc didn’t see a dentist until they were 5 and 8. However we follow dietary advice and brush throughly twice a day. Their teeth were therefore fine. I’m sure some children need to be seen for problems outside of their control but good diet and tooth brushing would prevent a ton of issues.

Our school sends home toothbrushes and toothpaste too.

I also had it back in the 90s....

DH and I are private but out private dentist sees our DC for free as NHS patients.

I often wonder why foodbanks done give out toothbrushes and toothpaste.

If you dont have £ to eat you're not going to buy these!

@Perpetuallyexhaustedtoddlermum

"I'm willing to bet that your GD went through a phase of not wanting her teeth brushed and it's unfortunately led to this"

I'll take that bet and raise you. My GD has never refused to clean her teeth or have them cleaned, at least not while she's been with me or her DD.

@PrtScn

I've bought baby toothbrushes, electric toothbrushes, battery operated toothbrushes and batteries, I even bought her mum an all singing all dancing Oral-b as she didn't clean her own teeth. Short of going round there and cleaning her teeth myself there is nothing I can do to make her clean them .. GD has tried to clean her teeth when she's at her mums but a 3/4/5 yr old cannot clean their teeth properly and should at minimum be supervised, which she's not.

www.statista.com/statistics/547781/frequency-individuals-brush-their-teeth-united-kingdom-uk/

Slightly more reassuring stats on adults and dental care.

So worrying about children though. Not attending the dentist used to be used as a signifier of neglect in the same way as not using other forms of healthcare, but social workers had to stop using teeth as a signifier due to dental deserts, and also our highly starchy and sugary diet so that parents who were otherwise not neglectful had children having baby teeth removed or couldn't find a dentist.

Of course not attending a dentist also means that teeth can't be treated early on, dental neglect can't be caught early and parents/carers and/or children educated about dental hygiene, and that's the problem, is that when people fall through the holes in our society now nobody discovers the issues. I imagine a lot of the kids with heavily neglected teeth will never get treated, lose them and it won't be caught until later on once they have adult teeth (because of the more dangerous root infections on adult teeth). They will also not be flagged as being neglected even when the dentist does see them.

The problem with using school attendance and lateness is that it is a blunt instrument, which treats kids with health problems, mental health conditions and neurodivergence who are struggling with attendance the same way it does with kids who are being neglected or abused, and a lot of the time these kids are missed when their attendance is good, which it often is because the parent prioritises time away from their child, or because they cling to school like a life raft as the one place where they will be fed and cared for.

If we had a properly functioning universal NHS dental system it would be easy to find out who was neglecting their kids dental hygiene, through their non attendance, or through their attendance at the dental practice and early intervention (which if followed would not be a safeguarding issue, and if it wasn't would). Which is the same as we have with healthcare, where if you don't take your child to get a broken bone looked at you get flagged to safeguarding, and if you do get your child's broken bone looked at they can see on an x Ray any concerning injuries, and start to form a record if their are repeated injuries. We need just as robust a response to dental health. Otherwise we will continue to see children having unnecessary extractions, families not supported when they do need help to make the necessary changes, and social services not intervening if they are unable to make those changes.

Instead we have the arbitrary attendance system, and very little else. And I'm not against the attendance system completely, I think it's good that children's absence is noticed and that schools can work with families regarding any underlying issues, I just wish it wasn't used as a blunt instrument, without nuance and without anything else in place for the children who have good attendance, but none the less are being neglected and abused.

If that means bringing back the nit nurse and the school nurse doing dental and other hygiene examinations, that would be great if it catches those poor kids who slip through the cracks. But personally I would rather see provision of universal NHS dentistry, that is properly funded so as to not make NHS dental contracts prohibitively expensive, but instead incentivises dentists to treat the most vulnerable people in our society with the same care as the richest

Nobody’s six-year-old child gets to that age having never had their teeth brushed because their parents didn’t have the money for a toothbrush and toothpaste. A toothbrush is something you only need to buy maybe twice a year, at a cost of less than a pound a pop. I don’t believe any half decent parent would let their child’s teeth rot rather than, at a desperate push, get into £2 of rent arrears a year.

@TheWholeToothNothingButTheTooth Gosh that's awful. To think the poor child has tried brushing her teeth herself.
This is purely on the mother then, if I was in your DS position I'd be looking at getting more custody on the grounds of neglect. All they'd have to do is look in the poor little girl's mouth.
I'm honestly shocked at the lack of care from the mother.

It happens because Wales is run by a Welsh Labour gov! Who care about children….they are aLeo about to provide free healthy school meals to all primary school children in Wales.
England is run by the tories who only care about themselves.

I'm sorry, but surely teeth brushing is a basic parenting responsibility.

FFS

I’m in my early 30s so I don’t know if anyone else is like me on that my parents didn’t really drum into me the importance of cleaning your teeth twice a day, almost like it wasn’t really a big thing for the time if you see what I mean. Anyway I have a number of fillings and root canals and also some caps from teeth knocked out in a car accident which had then had a knock on effect on the near by teeth, my teeth are awful but I do use a good electric toothbrush and tepe brushes now and keep them as well maintained as possible

Because of this I am absolutely obsessed about oral health for my own children I was still brushing their teeth after they had had a go up until they were about 11! And even now I check them twice a day!

It’s also because poverty and outcomes are more extreme in Wales and this is reflected in dental outcomes for dc

This doesnt happen in England.

I dont thi k my kods have ever seen a dentists in school.

The oldest used to get toothpaste and a toothbrush via sure start but this was stopped after a few months.

Any parent that doesn't bother to ever brush their children's teeth should be reported, it's neglect. Why would any parent think it is ok to let their child get cavities and abcesses and be in severe pain with swollen faces?! Children going under general anaesthetic to have most their baby teeth removed because parents failed to look after them is disgusting and dangerous.

Dental health in Wales, by any descriptor is amongst the worst in the U.K. The investment in dental services is less and waiting lists far,far higher than in England.
In my part ofWales a child needing emergency dental extractions with a general anaesthetic will be waiting up to 2 years. A couple of miles away in England it will be a few months. Still bad because when I started in dentistry a child in pain would have been treated within a week.
Instead Wales chooses to "invest " in encouraging dentists to apply fluoride to teeth when the reality is there is a vast morass of dental disease that needs treating with no dentists to treat.
Recruitment for doctors and dentists in Wales has always been more difficult than in England because of poorer pay and conditions.

It is neglect, but if it is only the neglect all that will happen is someone will talk to them about what they should be doing.

Three months! You wait far longer here. I know as a friend moving here with her kids waited over a year for her children to have an appointment. There are others on this thread who have waited longer.

It’s a bit odd how the below is written as the lowest stat is far more preferable. Although it is good progress has been made in Wales and Scotland. In 2008 at half dc with decay that is high

‘For example, between 2008 and 2018, visually obvious tooth decay among five year olds fell from 42.3% to 28.9% in Scotland.

Between 2008 and 2016, this reduced from 47.6% to 35.4% in Wales.

In comparison, prevalence only fell from 30.9% to 23.3% in England between 2008 and 2017.’

That was an article in 2020

The Tories have destroyed dentistry. What we have is good private care for the well off and everyone else struggles to access any dentistry in many parts of the country.

How on earth did she manage to keep her children? They should all be in care.

We do have fluoride in the water.

I'm exactly the same, although older, I didn't have parents, children's home staff didn't care if you cleaned your teeth or not. An ex knocked out 4, and my remaining teeth are a mess, everytime I go to the dentist it's a case of the horse has long bolted and I expect to be told you need falsies, but my own are holding on.

My childhood is why I was so anal with cleaning my own Ds's teeth, he's over 30 and has never had a filling or scrape and polish, and why I'm so set on my GDs teeth, I don't want her growing up like me and having the problems I had/have, sadly I have no control over that

Entitled to and able to access are two entirely different concepts. I moved rural last summer and after a 4 month search for a new NHS dentist, I’m now forking out for all 3DC to see a private one.

As far as I am aware only one person in the U.K. has been prosecuted for dental neglect of children.
Possibly because poor dental health is widely accepted as normal in the U.K. , dental decay is the number one reason for a child to be in hospital and the majority of 5 year olds already have dental decay in most areas of the U.K.

As a dental professional we have many times alerted social workers where a child "was not brought" for a dental appointment , but it has to be said dental decay happens across all classes. Although I've mostly worked in deprived areas have seen plenty of yummy mummies with children brought up on vegan smoothies, honey and agave , granola bars yoghurts etc with rampant decay who refuse to believe that their dietary choices are causing the problems because they never feed their children sweets,sugar or fizzy pop! That's without the growing number of anti fluoride types who use aloe Vera toothpaste and then wonder why their teeth are crumbling.

If you see a dentist it's only for a few minutes every year . It's what is put in the mouths of children and adults that's the major health problem. Tooth brushing with a fluoride toothpaste is a secondary concern.

Ive worked in refugee camps where children ,who previously have never needed any dental treatment , suddenly develop massive decay problems because the food and drink provided in the camps is loaded with sugar and starch.