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NEW PARENT TIPS: Teeth Brushing & Dental Care
Teeth Brushing Teamwork
My child fights me if I try to brush his teeth. They are just baby teeth, do they need brushing like permanent teeth?
YES! All our lives, all our teeth and sensitive gums need to be cleaned free of food debris by brushing and flossing once a day, at a minimum, to avoid serious short- and even permanent long-term dental and health problems. However, as important as the actual physical dental care issues are here, not putting off our mutual learning of compliance for care requirements, as necessary provider routines, are also critical. ALL young children need to learn to let their parents and dental providers do the work we need to do to care for them, for their health and protection. We adults must learn adaptive care skills too. Because, failing to learn how to assert our needs to care for their teeth can actually add worst practice and risk-of-harm forces to their innate delays due to Autism. This may then prevent us both from understanding how to: 1) tolerate urgent care procedures, and 2) cooperate with and eventually master teaching or learning the necessary daily life skill competencies, that may be required of us as adults with, and without, Autism. To help us all get started with good dental hygiene programs ASAP, we parents and professional may first need training to get through, and eventually avoid, behavioral briar patches that lead to tantrum quick sand long term. Once we all understand our adult authority and care roles, we can help folks with Autism discover their own self-control and task compliance/recognition capacities over time. Then they can fill their child roles of following demand routines using clear, concrete communication systems:
•Always work as, and with, adult providers who are willing to introduce new dental care routine step-by-step gradually, over more than one session or appointment, using visually and physically structured materials to present the tools WE will use to provide care for them.
•Put all your tools in a “start” basket on their left, and move them into a “finished” basket to their right to make care sequences predictable. This makes how “we MUST START and correctly FINISH this WORK” concepts clear.
•Simple, more general picture books of procedures will may make task expectations and steps understandable. Use color for “before/unclean” and white as “after/clean” Number teeth in the picture for correct brushing order to finish. Then show fun event coming next--with a SMILE.
•Use only hand-under-their hand supports to brush and floss, over what may be years of practice, until the child can do two unsupervised session each day. Otherwise, let them do one independent session each morning, and be sure to guide a full dental care session each night.
DREAM TEAM MATCHES
How can I find medical or dental providers who can work well with me and my child with Autism?
Autism family support meetings and Autism servcie providers can offer word of mouth referrals. ?In my work as a family provider role, I have found there are four provider archtypes of the medical/dental practitioner: The Tryant, The Leadership, The Active Followership, and The Passive Follower. In my work as a service provider role, I have found four parental archtypes: \The Tyrant, The Leader, The Active Followership, and The Passive Follower. The only way to find your own match is to first know yourself, and then get to know your care provider teammate well too. Two best-matched sets may be: A) The Tyrant practitioner and The Passive Follower parent, and B) The Passive Follower practitioner and Tyrant parent. We provider each other what we both want and expect in relation to each other. However, while we may get along, we can also get into risk-of-harm in our service and care, because all Autism providerships are enhanced by strong team work. Therefore, we would recommend we all board a second set of provider vehicles: C) The Leadership practitioner working with the Active Follower parent seeking to offer/access best professional practices; and, D) The Followership practitioner working with the Active Family Leaders seeking to learn/teach about best Autism parenting practices and adaptive provider accommodations that work for that one individual with Autism. These two team options give us the best chance of shifting back and forth in our two relational vehicles to get along well and create best practice professions. Open, honest communications, about ongoing flexible plans, created by mutual consensus are keys to all our teams’ successes. If a plan fails, avoid blaming any one team member for what are the mutual impacts of Autism.(see the Biomedical & Medical Care Link to get tips on positive procedure management).
Note: these articles were originally published with the author's permission in the The Net Journal of the Autism Society of Oregon. Winter 2004 Issue. Sharone Lee, Editor and Author. They have been returned to their home at Threshold, but have been kept in our public access pages for all our parent's use.
You may send in additional questions on this topic for us to answer.
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