Growing Up Smiling

What to do: Wipe your baby's gums with a clean, damp cloth once a day, even before any tooth appears. Chilled, not frozen, clean teething rings help. A frozen ring is hard enough to bruise the gum.

Watch for: Teething does not cause a high fever, diarrhoea or a rash. If your baby has those, it is something else and worth seeing a doctor about.

What to do: Start brushing the day the first tooth appears, twice a day, with a soft baby brush and a smear of fluoride toothpaste the size of a grain of rice.

Watch for: A bottle of milk or juice in the cot at night pools sugar around the new front teeth for hours. This is the single most common cause of decay in very young children.

What to do: Book a first visit even though nothing is wrong. It is short, gentle, usually done with your baby on your lap, and it sets the pattern that the dentist is somewhere you go routinely rather than somewhere you go when something hurts.

Watch for: White or brown lines along the gum edge of the upper front teeth are early decay, not staining. They are easy to miss and much easier to treat early.

What to do: Move to a pea-sized amount of fluoride toothpaste. Brush your child's teeth for them, a three-year-old does not have the hand control to do it properly, however keen they are. Let them have a go first, then you finish.

Watch for: Encourage spitting rather than rinsing after brushing. Rinsing washes away the fluoride that has just been applied.

What to do: Ask about fissure sealants for these teeth. The biting surface has deep grooves narrower than a toothbrush bristle, and sealing them is quick, painless and needs no drilling.

Watch for: Because no tooth falls out first, these are often mistaken for baby teeth and treated as expendable. They are adult teeth and are meant to last a lifetime.

What to do: Have the assessment even if the teeth look straight. Some of the most useful orthodontic work is done early and invisibly, by guiding growth rather than moving teeth.

Watch for: Crowding, a crossbite, or a thumb-sucking habit that is still going strong. All three are much simpler to address now than at fourteen.

What to do: Keep six-monthly check-ups going. This is the age when brushing quietly slips, because children take it over themselves and nobody is checking.

Watch for: If a baby tooth is lost early, knocked out or extracted, the teeth either side can drift into the gap and block the adult tooth underneath. A space maintainer holds the room until it comes through.

What to do: Discuss braces versus clear aligners honestly with your teenager in the room. Aligners only work if they are actually worn for the required hours a day, and that is their decision to keep, not yours.

Watch for: Cleaning around fixed braces is genuinely harder and decay around the brackets is common. This is worth more attention than the straightening itself.

What to do: Have them assessed before they cause trouble. Knowing early whether there is space changes whether anything needs doing at all.

Watch for: Not every wisdom tooth needs removing. Many sit perfectly well and are best left alone, assessment is about knowing which.

What to do: Ask for a summary of your child's dental history to pass on. Eighteen years of records, what was treated, what was watched, how they cope with treatment, is worth handing over rather than starting again.

Watch for: This is the point where a lot of young adults stop going to a dentist at all. Booking the first adult appointment before they leave makes it far more likely they keep going.