Advice needed, DD needs 5 teeth extracted, dentist says breastfeeding to blame

[Bibulus]

Well, strictly speaking, she said I had bfed too long (2.5yrs, hardly that long imo but there we are)

Poor DD (5yrs) has an abscess in her front tooth and a further three top front teeth are decayed and need to come out under GA, and a molar as well.

At first the dentist was adamant that she must have been bottlefed juice to go to sleep, as that was what the pattern of decay suggested, and she took some convincing when we told her that DD had never had a bottle.

However when we told her that I used to bf her to sleep, she seized on that as the problem.

Am 35wks pg with dc2 and am totally confused. How on earth am I supposed to avoid tooth decay? The dentist said that as soon as her teeth had come through, what I I should have been doing is taking her off the breast before she fell asleep, cleaning her teeth (which presumably would have the effect of waking her right up again), and then getting her off to sleep by rocking etc.

Has anyone else managed to do this? it sounds totaly impossible to me with an older baby or toddler

Can't believe my poor DD has to have a general anaesthetic. just feel so guilty :(

Stop feeling guilty she is absolutely wrong. Will find you the links later as just off out but bm doesn't cause tooth damage for multiple reasons. Either your daughter has been unlucky, had reflux or some other factor which has impacted on her enamel.

Ditch the guilt, incidentally my old dentist (some major dental big wig) did some work on this and despite his horror at feeding past two (about the mother...blah, blah, blah) did agree that it had no negative impact on dental health.

I've bf all of mine to about age 3yo and none of them has a problem with teeth. Our dentist says unless you're silly (ie bottles of juice to sleep etc) it's mostly genetics as to whether you have good teeth or bad.

Dentist talking rubbish

pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/120/4/e944.abstract

Could you go back and educate your dentist? It's a shame for them to continue talking crap to other people

Could you go back and educate your dentist? It's a shame for them to continue talking crap to other people

Apart from the abscess, which probably gets treated with antibiotics first, is your daughter in pain?
Because some dentists first try other remedies like 'painting' the affected teeth with fluoride before deciding on something as dramatic as extraction.

Could you not seek a second opinion?

kelly mom, as ever, has comprehensive information with links to studies on the subject :

kellymom.com/ages/older-infant/tooth-decay/

No-one's found a link, and a study which immersed teeth in various liquids concluded that BM may as well be water, and perhaps even strengthened the teeth.

Thanks for comments all.

The dentist hasn't offered anti bs for the abscess, why didn't i ask her that?! Will ring tomorrow

I was sure she was talking bollocks re: bfing to sleep. It seemed suspect to me that first of all it was bottlefeeding that was to blame, and then it became bfing - can't win really!

Amazingly DD is really excited about the tooth fairy taking 5 teeth at once! she is looking forward to getting a huge wodge of cash under her pillow (we are going to buy her a new bicycle) and she is happy about the anaesthetic.

Neither of mine has any fillings so far, and they were both bf long term. I really do think a lot of it is luck.

The links are good. There is no evidence that BF ing causes tooth decay. Print them and take them to your dentist. Smile and say, I did some research after my last visit and would like to leave these articles with you ;)

Decay in front teeth is almost always caused by sweet drinks though. Did your dd have one of those non-spill cups at all?

You may not need antibiotics for the infection unless she has a facial swelling. The teeth are the source of the infection and until they are removed she will have some form of chronic infection, even if you take antibiotics.

I wonder if the dentist was looking at it from the angle of breastfeeding to sleep - ie teeth should be brushed before sleep and no more milk after teeth brushing?

my daughter was breast fed, had very few sweets, no fizzy drinks etc but had rubbish baby teeth!! felt like a reaaly bad mother...but lovely dentist assured me that it is just the luck of the draw for some people. She also had problems with how her adult teeth formed so has special tooth paste which seems to help.
I have a twin brother who has perfect teeth...one filling, mine are held up by scaffolding!! same diet as kids .
Don't feel gulity, people assume it's down to parenting whereas if your child had poor hearing or sight , they wouldn't!!

That's only true of cow's milk bunbaker, not bm.

Our ancient ancestors suffered hardly any tooth decay at all (skulls show this) yet would have been long term bfed.

AFAIK breastmilk is neutral to teeth as long as there is no other food present, so clean teeth before bed.

birds a baby's tongue is down when it is feeding so cannot see how it is pressing against top teeth!

But the tongue doesn't press up against the teeth during bf, the breast does. Part of the reason bf is safer for teeth is that the breast Is drawn into the mouth and the nipple is toward the back of the palate, unlike a bottle in which the teat is behind the front teeth.

Stuff and nonsense

I BF DD2 long after she went to school, she takes sugar free squash to bed (which isn't as good as water, which she will not drink.)

She's had one milk tooth filled in 11 years. Why because she sodding well won't do more than vaguely wave a tooth brush in the right direction.

It may have been a factor in your DDs tooth decay, but not the whole picture, so don't beat yourself up.

I would always recommend caution for any kind of a drink other than water to be consumed after brushing a child's teeth, including breast milk and cows milk.

Really have a good look at your DDs diet. I don't think I've met anyone who hasn't had decay for some kind of a reason, usually something strange and surprising. Even the weakest teeth can be decay free providing the diet is impeccable.

Sorry your DD is having to go through this, but the good thing is (and honestly, take it as a good thing) is that now you can really look at your DDs diet and figure out what might be going wrong before the adult teeth come through.

(I speak as a dentist and a mum with a daughter who has a few fillings - eek!)

My dc's were both breastfed to sleep (oh the horror of it... ) for the first year of their life and neither one has any cavities at all. Some people have softer teeth than others. It's mostly genetics which can be compounded by bad habits like juice and coke (have really seen this) bottles - which clearly you are not doing. By the way, being an american and rather wed to the wonders of fluoride, i made a point of giving my dc's fluoride drops when we lived in the uk and importing american children's toothpaste which has much higher amounts of fluoride than the british toothpaste.

SofiaAmes we have floride added to our water supply, which i dont believe is true of the states? This means other things can be weaker so not to cause floride-based problems (iirc too much floride can also cause major problems with teeth as exbf suffered from this) and it can be bad for babies and young children to get too much in their systems hence children's toothpaste is much weaker again.

Only around 10% of people in the uk have fluoride added to their water supply

Birdsofshoreandsea please see the above links, current studies show no evidence for bm being cariogenic (causing dental caries)

sleepybump, as thedentist has said, actually only a couple of major cities in the uk add fluoride to their water and pretty much everyone in the states has fluoride in their water....the high fluoride toothpaste for kids in the use is on top of the fluoridated water.

At the time I did some calculations of how much fluoride I was giving my children and found that it was no where near what was considered excessively high levels (I seem to remember that in fact fluoridosis was the main worry, and not anything else, but could be remembering wrong), so really didn't worry too much.

whoops that meant to be high fluoride toothpaste in the USA...stupid spell check....have you found that it even corrects mums net if you don't capitalize it....ugh...who has time for capitalizing when you are fixing all the problems in the world.