Baby teeth are the primary teeth that appear within your child’s mouth from around the age of six months old. Although only a temporary factor in the long term composition of your baby’s mouth, they are never the less, an important stage in the growth of the child and as such, proper oral hygiene should be maintained from the moment they appear.
Not only will this serve to keep the child’s mouth healthy, it also allows the child to learn from the youngest age, the importance of good oral hygiene.
It is important for the parent to be aware of the importance of their child’s primary teeth and to appreciate the consequences of not implementing rigorous hygiene from the very beginning. Baby teeth are not immune to tooth decay and in spite of their temporary nature, they are of fundamental importance in the health and development of the surrounding gum and permanent teeth.
At age six, generally baby teeth start to be lost and replaced by erupting adult teeth. The exfoliation of baby teeth progresses throughout the life of a child until about age 13 when usually all of the baby teeth have been lost and replaced by adult teeth. Baby teeth serve many important functions for a developing child: chewing function and efficiency, appearance and self esteem, speech, enunciation and language development, and they hold a space in the mouth for the subsequent eruption of eventual adult teeth.
Primary teeth essentially allow the adult teeth to find their way through the gum in the correct fashion, and as such, act as a guide for the final development of the mouth. For this reason, the importance of the care and upkeep of baby teeth should not be overlooked.