If you’re a person in the United States, then you should be taking advantage of your access to regular dental care – for both yourself and for your children alike. Ultimately, even the care and keeping of the baby teeth can have an important impact on the health of the adult teeth that eventually come in. Fortunately, the care and keeping of teeth is easier than one might thing, as just about any kids dentist will be able to tell you.

For one thing, regular brushing can end up going a long way. Brushing is typically recommended to occur twice a day, and brushing on this basis can prevent a great deal of tooth decay. It is also something that can start earlier on in life than many people actually realize. As a matter of fact, even babies can have their gums with budding teeth wiped with a wet washcloth. And as long as fluoride toothpaste is not used before the age of two, child safe toothpaste can also be used for older babies and young toddlers to help them get used to the concept of brushing and all that it entails.

Of course, fluoride can be essential for building healthy teeth and so it is quite hugely important to introduce it when necessary. For instance, giving your child only bottled water to drink is less than ideal for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s incredibly wasteful. Moving away from as many single use plastics as possible is becoming more and more essential with each passing year. In addition to this, bottled water does not contain fluoride – but tap water does. Therefore, drinking tap water can help to strengthen your child’s teeth. Fortunately, education is everything as up to 65% of all parents in the year of 2012 (according to one study) did not even know about fluoride as it pertained to bottled water – and the levels in which it could be found in such water sources.

Taking them in to see a family dentist will also be hugely important to the overall care and keeping of their teeth. Going to the dentist from an early age – ideally from around the age of one but no later than the age of two – will help to get kids used to the concept of the dentist and all that a dental visit entails. A dentist for children such as a pediatric dentist will be particularly able to make kids comfortable in the dentist’s chair for the very first time, an experience that can otherwise be quite frightening. But the right dentist can make it a comfortable experience – and sometime even a fun one. Ideally, you should be taking your child to the dentist at least twice throughout the year, much in the same way that you too should be going to dentist on such a regular basis.

Dentists can also perform dental procedures like the filling of cavities, something that is quite hugely important, should cavities ever develop. Fortunately, dental sedation is becoming more and more accessible to more and more people all throughout the country. In fact, the data that surrounds dental sedation and its practice more than backs up this claim, showing that there are now as many a 250,000 dental sedations occurring over the course of just one year. And nowadays, the procedure, at the hands of just about any dentist, is safe for children as well, allowing them to have necessary dental procedures performed with as little fear and pain as possible.

But cavities can be avoided as well. After all, even small steps like avoiding sugary drinks can help to prevent them. While most know to avoid sodas, many people don’t realize that energy drinks should be avoided as well. As a matter of fact, drinking an energy drink will result in double the total enamel loss as drinking a sports drink – and sports drinks of all kinds are quite notoriously laden with sugar. If energy drinks are worse, it just goes to show how detrimental they truly are. Avoiding other forms of processed and added sugars can also seriously benefit your teeth.