Healthy Teeth = Better School Performance

All parents quickly learn one thing about their children: Sickness is inevitable. And sick children miss school. Although asthma is sometimes cited as the most common childhood disease, the actual leader, according to the National Institutes of Health, is dental caries. More than four in 10 school-aged children suffer from caries; that means your child is more than five times more likely to have caries than to develop asthma.

Early tooth loss caused by dental decay can lead to a wide range of problems:

*failure to thrive

*impaired speech development

*absence from and inability to concentrate in school

*reduced self-esteem

Dental problems in children have been linked to shyness, unhappiness, feelings of worthlessness and reduced friendliness. These effects grow as children get older; unhappiness and feeling of worthlessness peak for adolescents between 15 and 17 years.

Studies have suggested that children miss more than 1.7 million school days annually due to dental issues. And children who miss school don’t do as well socially or academically as do children with regular school attendance. Children with dental problems are more likely to have problems at school and less likely to do all their homework. Children suffering from a toothache cannot concentrate on their schoolwork and do not score as well on tests as do healthy children. Their school performance suffers, which tends to have a negative impact on their self-esteem.

But not all school absences have equal impact on a child’s progress. In a 2011 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina found that “school absences caused by dental pain or infection were significantly related to parents’ reports of poor school performance, whereas school absences for routine dental care were not. These findings underscore the likelihood that school absence is not a stand-alone factor in considerations of school performance, providing further evidence that children experiencing pain or infection may have a diminished educational experience because their discomfort may inhibit their ability to perform well while at school.”

Good oral hygiene and regular visits to the dentist, even if those visits have to be scheduled during school hours, help keep your child’s teeth healthy. And children with good oral health are more likely to have better outcomes at school.