Morning Appointments for Young Kids

We absolutely love our patients! We work hard to make sure that we give them the best possible experience in our office and that they will grow up to be comfortable in any dental setting. However, there are many factors that make that happen and we often need parental support in achieving them.

One of the most important considerations is as simple as bringing little kids to us early in the morning. We highly recommend having young children come even for cleaning appointments before their full day of school. Attending school can be stressful. The stimulation of playing, learning, and navigating social situations exhausts even us adults, and for kids can make a difference between a successful dental visit and a tearful one. As parents ourselves, we are keenly aware of the difficulty of evening routines at home with our kids due to the exhaustion and overstimulation of the day. We understand that in a dental office we are putting kids in stressful situations. We recline their chairs, shine big lights in their faces, check their teeth with sharp instruments and take x-rays that can be uncomfortable in their little mouths. And these procedures are just for a regular cleaning appointment! We work very hard on earning kids’ trust and convincing them that dental visits are easy and that they are safe. Having a child who has had a full day of stress prior to seeing us can set us up for failure and make kids, parents and us sad.

Some little ones who come to our office in the afternoon and have a very difficult time handling routine cleanings get rescheduled for the morning and then do very well. After several successful morning appointments, we are perfectly happy seeing younger kids later in the day, but three and four o’clock appointments are still difficult for them. In addition, our teenagers from middle school and high school truly need those appointments as missing school is very difficult for them at that age.

If children are coming for appointments other than simple cleanings, such as fillings or crowns, we highly recommend sticking to the morning time even if they already do well for routine checkups. Those appointments are nerve wrecking even for adults and being well rested is crucial to success. After appointments that require no oral sedation, kids can immediately head back to school. If oral conscious sedation is used, kids cannot have any food before the appointment, and they must stay home for the rest of the day as the medicine wears off. Due to requiring an empty stomach and our team needing to monitor kids until the medications wear off with an afternoon phone call, these appointments are only allowed on or before 10am in our office.

Both our clinical experience and extensive research show that young kids do much better in the morning for any stressful situations. We understand dental appointments are not easy and can bring on a lot of anxiety. Our team does everything in our power to make them fun, easy, and exciting, but there is little we can do once children come to us already tired. Please call us with any further questions and we look forward to seeing our beautiful little ones with smiles on their faces first thing in the morning!

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our office anytime at 713-461-1509.

Dr. Lindhorst, Dr. Theriot and our Smiles For Kids Team