When should I first bring my lovely child to the dentist?

a child first be seen by a dentist when the first baby tooth erupts, or by the age of one year. At this visit, the parent holds the child on his or her knee while the dentist sits facing the parent knee to knee. While the child will not yet have all of his or her baby teeth in place by the age of one, a visual inspection allows the dentist to assess for the beginning of early childhood decay (nursing bottle caries) and to council the parents on any obvious problems that appear to be developing. Most childhood falls that result in injuries to the teeth happen between the ages of two and three, while the child is learning to coordinate his movements. In an emergency, parents are very glad to have the telephone number of a sympathetic doctor who already knows their baby.

Should the parent accompany the child into the operatory

The answer we learned in dental school was NO!! Children always behave better without the parent in sight.

The real answer to this question is: It depends entirely on the child (and the parents).

I have found that in a majority of cases, children do perfectly well with parents in the dentist's room, except in particular cases and the ones in which the parents are best asked to leave for the waiting room.

The behavior of children in the dental treatment depends on the child's trust in his/her parents, dentist and his or her willingness to surrender control over his own body, even at the expense of minor pain, to an adult he does not know. Trust is a quality learned at home, on the playground and at school. Children who have learned that adults trusted by their parents are adults to be trusted by them are more likely to have better experiences at the office than those who have learned to distrust adults in general. Children who have been trained to expect adults to make good decisions on their behalf are more likely to have better experiences than those who tend to make all their own decisions at home.
Their inability to affect the dentist's behavior in the same way they do their parents scares them, and the "bad experience" escalates from there. If a parent of one of these children is in the operatory, the child plays to the parent and the behavior only gets worse.

The child's behavior is the variable that cannot be controlled by the dentist directly. It depends upon the factors discussed above, as well as things such as how much sleep the child got last night, the time of day of the appointment (mornings are always best), recent events in the child's life, and the horror stories told to the child by his friends, siblings, and even his parents.

A am pretty sure that mostly dentists experience these major issues, kids' behavior in dental room are sometimes interesting and irrational, I found several kids who even didn't let me see their teeth and they had never come to any dentist for any treatment.. it usually need a while to get their trust and their parents supports:)

Should I bring my child to a children's specialist?

While I, as a general dentist, treat a vast majority of children who come to my office, I never treat a truly uncooperative child. I never restrain a child. If he won't let me do my job, I refer him to a pedodontist (a specialist who deals with children's dentistry exclusively). they must spend a lot of time doing "behavior modification", they can charge for the service, something which as a general dentist I cannot do and justify:)

Pedodontists have special training in dealing with children's dental problems, not just their behavior. They are better equipped to perform simple interceptive orthodontic procedures on children without referral to an orthodontist. General dentists refer patients to them all the time for problems peculiar to children, such as developmental difficulties and root canals on adult teeth that have not fully formed.

There are three very good reasons that baby teeth are just as important as adult teeth, and must be just as well protected from disease.

1.Children need their teeth as much as you do to chew and smile. If the teeth are allowed to become decayed, that child will suffer pain and an inability to eat properly which can lead to lifelong eating disorders, or at minimum poor nutrition for the time during which the child is unable to eat properly. Children have social lives too, and the stigma of blackened stumps and bad breath can lead to derision (serious teasing) at school and at play, and could effect the child's social development.

2.Bad baby teeth usually mean frequent visits to the dentist under very poor circumstances. The child has not slept well, he is in a bad mood, and the dentist is the last person he really wants to see. In addition, by the time they are seen, the dentist must usually remove the tooth, which is what the parents expect anyway. So his visits always amount to painful episodes from which he emerges missing a piece of his body! This sets the stage for not only bad behavior on succeeding dental visits, but for a person with a lifelong fear of dentists who will probably end up with dentures.

3. Finally, baby teeth are essential for holding the spaces open so that the adult teeth can come into the correct position when they are finally developed enough to erupt ("erupt" means to come through the gums for the first time). If certain of the baby teeth are removed before nature intended, the adult teeth that develop earliest will move into inappropriate positions crowding out the space necessary for the eruption of other adult teeth which develop at a later date. This can lead to not only crooked teeth, but to real functional problems as well. These involve chewing difficulties, TMJ problems, and pronounced facial asymmetries (this means that one side of the face develops more than the other side due to the differences in the way that the muscles on either side are used in chewing and grinding the teeth.)

A person gets two sets of teeth at different stages of life for very good reasons. The adult version will not fit into a baby's mouth, yet that child must still be able to chew food. So while nature gave children a temporary set of teeth in order to fill a space that would otherwise have to remain vacant until age 12, she thought she might give them some extra work to do as well.

At what age should my baby's teeth first erupt? ("erupt" means to "appear in the mouth".)

The baby teeth begin to erupt at about age 6 months and continue until about age 24 months at which time all 20 of the baby teeth should be in place. In general, the teeth erupt from the front to the back, and the lowers come in about 2 to 6 months before the corresponding top teeth. If your child is late, don't worry. They may finish as much as a year behind schedule. If your child is missing one or more baby teeth, it does NOT necessarily mean that she will be missing the corresponding adult teeth.

At what age should my child's adult teeth erupt?

You should begin to see your child's first adult teeth even before they lose their first baby teeth, at about age 6. At about the same time the lower baby central incisors will loosen and fall out to allow the adult central incisors to erupt. All the baby teeth should be gone, or the remaining ones lose by age 12. The adult teeth that are forming under them will continue to erupt through age 17 or 18 when the wisdom teeth finally are supposed to erupt. I say "supposed to" because many times they remain impacted and must be extracted. This eruption schedule is not set in fixed-order. Some kids are just late in growth and may be a year late in their eruption schedule.
(adapted from http://www.doctorspiller.com/Children%27s%20Dentistry.htm)