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Written by the team at Dashing Ducks Croydon
Preschool Croydon: The Day the Dentist Came to Us
Most children meet a dentist for the first time in a clinic. A chair that tips backwards, a bright light overhead, a stranger asking them to open wide. That is a lot to take in when you are four. In August, Dashing Ducks Preschool Croydon tried it the other way around and invited the dentist to come to us.
Roaming Smiles Dentistry spent the morning with our ducklings. By the end of it the children had talked about teeth, looked at teeth, and had their own gently checked, and none of them had to leave a room they already knew well.
A morning with Roaming Smiles Dentistry
Roaming Smiles Dentistry is a mobile service that works with childcare centres and schools, so the equipment and the routine came to the children rather than the other way around.
For a preschooler that difference is not a small one. Nothing about the room had changed. The educators were the same ones who had helped at morning tea. The children who went first were friends they see every day. When everything else in a space already feels safe, the one new thing in it shrinks down to something a child can handle.
Parents tell us the hard part of a first dental visit is rarely the check itself. It is the build-up: the drive there, the waiting room, the child reading your face to work out whether this is something to be worried about. Take that away and you are left with a friendly adult and a mirror.
What our Preschool Croydon children took away
The session covered dental health and oral hygiene, and our educators said the children stayed with it from start to finish. Rather than reconstruct the running order from memory, we would rather point you at the people who were actually in the room. Ask any of our Croydon educators at pick-up and they will happily walk you through what the morning looked like.
What sessions like this usually rest on is simple enough for a three year old to carry around. Brush twice a day. Let a grown-up finish the job. Water is the everyday drink and sweet things are for sometimes. None of that will be news to parents, but children hear it very differently when it comes from a visitor whose entire job is teeth.
A check-up without the waiting room
The children also had their teeth checked during the visit, and that part does more work than it sounds like it should. A first dental experience that happens in a familiar room, with familiar adults a few steps away, gives a child a reference point. The next appointment is not a first anymore. It is a repeat of something that already went fine.
Raising Children Network has clear guidance for families on when dental visits should start and what actually happens at one. The timing usually surprises people. The recommended first check comes much earlier than most families assume, closer to the arrival of the first teeth than the start of school.
If your child has a check-up coming up, this is a good week to bring it up in conversation. A child who can tell the story of getting their teeth looked at is a child rehearsing it, and rehearsal is most of what takes the fear out.
Where this sits in our learning program
Looking after your own body is part of Outcome 3 of the Early Years Learning Framework, which covers children taking increasing responsibility for their own health and wellbeing. It is one of the more concrete corners of the framework, and you can watch it happen: hands washed before lunch, a hat found without being asked, teeth brushed properly instead of chewed at.
Bringing outside visitors in is one of the ways we make that stick. A conversation about teeth is a conversation. A dentist in the room with a mirror and a light is an event, and children remember events long after the conversation has gone.
Keeping it going at home
If you want to hold onto the momentum, let your child do the brushing first and then quietly finish the job yourself. Small children have plenty of enthusiasm and very little wrist control, and almost all of them miss the back molars completely.
We invite visitors like Roaming Smiles in because our families are busy, and because a habit formed at four costs a great deal less than a filling at seven. If you are weighing up child care in Croydon and want to see how a morning like this actually runs, we would rather show you than describe it. Come and have a look around, or read what other Inner West families have said about us.
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