Three Tips For Ensuring That A Child's Toothbrush Stays Clean And Effective
To prevent budding cavities from complicating your child's life, you'll need to watch both your family's eating habits and your child's brushing habits. But even if your child brushes as diligently as any other child in your neighborhood, cavities can still result from a toothbrush that's less effective or dirtier than it should be. Use these three tips if you want to ensure that a child's toothbrush stays as clean and as effective as possible.
Put A Toothbrush Holder In The Bathroom For Easy Air Drying
If you don't have a toothbrush holder in your bathroom, the toothbrush your child uses will have to be stored either in a medicine cabinet or on a sink. In this case, even if you tell your child to always keep the toothbrush right side up to allow the bristles to dry in the air, time constraints could lead to carelessness. And unless you're extremely diligent with cleaning the surface the bristles lie on, lots of bacteria are sure to cling to your child's toothbrush.
Toothbrush holders are so useful because they provide organized and easy to use drying positions for multiple toothbrushes at once. Since putting a toothbrush back is usually as simple as sliding it through a hole, your child will be able to keep up the habit even when his mind is focused on something else. Organization will also make it less likely that your child accidentally uses a toothbrush belonging to someone else one day.
Periodically Leave The Toothbrush In A Salt Water Mixture
The longer the toothbrush goes uncleaned, the more bacteria from your child's mouth will build up on it. Salt water is such a good thing to use here precisely because it's so easy to make. Instead of boiling water or buying a specialized toothbrush cleaning chemical, you merely have to mix in a little salt with a glass you fill from your bathroom's faucet.
It's so easy, in fact, that you can teach your child to do it every once in awhile when he has more time on the weekends. Alternatively, to cut down on pathogens when they're likely to be at their strongest, you can tell your child to wash the toothbrush's bristles after the symptoms of any illness begin to subside.
Always Be On The Lookout For Frayed Bristles
The bristles on a toothbrush need to be relatively straight if they're going to make contact with and clean enamel properly. Crooked bristles will have a particularly hard time getting into the recesses that cavities typically form in without bending even further to the point of uselessness.
To decrease the rate at which the bristles on your child's toothbrush bend out of shape, make sure that your child isn't pressing the bristles against his teeth harder than he has to. Every few months, inspect your child's toothbrush yourself and replace it if more than a few outlying bristles are obviously bent too far to be of much use.
For more information, talk to a professional like Kids Dental Tree.