Tips for Keeping Your Children’s Teeth Healthy

Posted on: 29 March 2021

Lingual braces are a great way to straighten your teeth discreetly. Most, if not all, people will never even realize that you are undergoing orthodontic treatment while you wear lingual braces. But while wearing your lingual braces, you need to ensure that you take good care of them. The better you take care of them, the better your results will be when you finally have your braces removed.

To ensure that your lingual braces stay in good shape during your treatment, use the following six tips.

1. Avoid habits like chewing pencils

This might seem obvious but many people don't even realize what they are doing until it's too late. Avoid habits that will put pressure on your lingual braces, such as biting on pens, chewing ice, and opening packets with your teeth.

2. Avoid hard foods

Try to avoid foods that put unnecessary pressure on your teeth. Remember that your braces are moving your teeth through bone in order to achieve the results you desire. This means that hard foods could put pressure on your teeth. Not only that, but hard foods could dislodge the brackets on the backs of your teeth. This will slow down your treatment.

3. Avoid sticky foods

Sticky foods, like hard foods, could dislodge your brackets. This means that you need to avoid foods like sticky toffee, chewing gum, and other sweet treats.

4. Rinse your mouth out after meals

Just as with traditional braces, food particles can lodge around your brackets and under the wire during meals. If you don't remove these particles of food, oral bacteria will flourish around your brackets and cause gum disease and even tooth decay, both of which will hamper your orthodontic treatment. Rinse your mouth out after every meal to remove food particles.

4. Use a water flosser to remove food particles5

Another good way to remove stubborn food particles is to use a water flosser. This is useful when you find that food items like steak have lodged beside your brackets. You can then retreat to the bathroom to remove the food before you go on with your day.

6. Brush around your brackets

The area around the brackets is a place where oral bacteria tend to congregate. This is why plaque and tartar are both common around the dental brackets of patients with poor oral hygiene. If you don't remove the oral bacteria from around your brackets every day, you could end up with tooth decay and enamel demineralization. Therefore, to avoid this issue, ensure that you brush around the brackets of your lingual braces during every oral hygiene session.

If you follow these six tips while undergoing your treatment, you can better achieve the results that you desire. For more information about braces, contact a dentist.