Why Early Orthodontic Treatment Matters for Your Child's Smile
At Anchor Orthodontics, we believe in the power of early intervention to create healthy, beautiful smiles that last a lifetime. Many parents assume that waiting until middle school or early high school is the best approach for orthodontic treatment, but in some cases, this delay can lead to more complex and invasive treatments later on.
What Is Early Intervention Orthodontics?
Early intervention, typically recommended for children between the ages of six and eight and up until ten, isn't about extra treatment. It's about providing the most effective and conservative care possible. At Anchor Orthodontics, we assess your child's growth patterns to determine if early treatment could prevent future issues. It's also known as Phase 1 of two-phase treatment.
The Benefits of Starting Early
- Prevent Complex Issues: By addressing orthodontic concerns early, such as jaw misalignment or crowding, we can guide your child's development, potentially avoiding the need for surgery or tooth extractions later.
- Customized Care: Not every child needs early treatment, but a visit to Anchor Orthodontics around age six or seven allows us to monitor growth and intervene if necessary, ensuring the best outcome for your child.
- Shorter Treatment Time: Early treatment can significantly reduce the length and complexity of future orthodontic care. For example, what might have required two years of braces could be shortened to just one year with early intervention.
How Anchor Orthodontics Can Help
At Anchor Orthodontics, our expert team is dedicated to providing personalized care tailored to your child's unique needs. Early intervention can correct issues like narrow upper arches, underbites, and severe overbites by guiding growth and development at a crucial time. It's also central to our airway-focused approach.
Dr. Lavigne on the Biggest Early Treatment Misconception
Is early treatment "extra" treatment? Here is Dr. Lavigne's honest, longer answer on when Phase 1 helps, when it doesn't, and why waiting can sometimes mean extractions or surgery later.
There's a common misconception today that early intervention orthodontics or treating a patient when they're six, seven, eight years old is more aggressive than waiting until they're in middle school or maybe early high school like we were treated when we were younger. And I wanna clear up a few things about that because for certain patients, it can actually become more aggressive to wait until all of their permanent teeth are in their mouth to treat them. I know that I had a patient when I was doing cosmetic dentistry in my last practice, and they said, I really like to take all of my kids to this specific orthodontist because he will wait until they're older and won't do an extra round of treatment when they're younger. And I think a lot of people think it's extra treatment and that doing two phases of treatment when they're young and then when they're twelve versus just treating them when they're twelve years old gets you to the same result. And in a lot of cases, that's not true at all. When we wait to treat a a patient when they're twelve years old, if growth hasn't been going in the right direction, maybe the top jaw is too far forward or the bottom jaw is too far back or the bottom jaw has an underbite and is too far forward. Any of those situations, if we wait until they're twelve years old, we have limited options to treat them in a conservative manner. A lot of those patients end up being surgical adult patients. And if we can get that patient into a better growth situation to avoid surgery in the future, early intervention at six, seven, eight years old can actually modify how things are developing. Another common situation is that when we wait until all of the adult teeth are in in a patient that has a lot of crowding and not a lot of space in their mouth, if we don't see them until they're twelve years old, many times we have to extract permanent teeth, otherwise healthy teeth, in order to get the teeth to fit together. If we see that same patient when they're younger, we're able to advance the to to help modify the growth of the bone and make more room in their mouth so that by the time they're twelve and all the adult teeth are coming in, there's space for all of the adult teeth. So it's kind of apples and oranges to compare doing early treatment and then followed up after that early treatment with a second round of treatment to patients that just get one round of treatment. Not everybody needs early intervention, but it benefits you greatly to see an orthodontist by six or seven years old so that you can determine if things are growing correctly and you can just be monitored until maybe you are twelve and that's the appropriate time to intervene. Or if you see an orthodontist at six or seven, things aren't growing as well as they could be, you can do some simple modifications to growth that will set them up for a better situation when they are twelve years old, more room in the mouth, jaws that that are compatible with one another. And you can actually end up with a more conservative second round of treatment. Often, I'll see my patients that have an early intervention or phase one treatment when they're seven or eight. Once they get to the point where all of their adult teeth are in their mouth and it's time to do the full set of braces or time to do the full set of aligners, they need very minimal treatment at that point. Maybe without that first phase, it would have been two years of treatment. Maybe now it's a year or a year and a half. So it's really not it's not a one size fits all to say that all patients should be treated at seven years old or all patients should be treated at twelve years old. But for the patients that could use some growth modification, being caught early allows them a healthier, more conservative, more ideal outcome when you can modify things at that earlier reach.
Don't wait until it's too late. Schedule an early orthodontic evaluation with Anchor Orthodontics today. Our team will help you determine the best time to start treatment, ensuring a healthy, beautiful smile for your child.
