Helping Kids Adjust to Braces

My daughter and I are working with 3M this year as we review Clarity™ ADVANCED Ceramic Braces. You can find out more about these particular ceramic braces on the first post here.

And…the braces are on!! Check it out.

I was chatting to our orthodontist, Dr Marcus Todd, and he’s a fan of 3M products. The glue used on the Clarity™ ADVANCED Ceramic Braces is a new technology (and not one yet available on the metal option). It means the braces are easily applied and removed, and yet still provide super-strong support and their smooth surface makes them  comfortable. Plus the risk of staining the teeth is dramatically reduced. The brackets are small and are designed to blend with the tooth’s natural colour.

The application of the brackets (braces) took under 10 minutes, so super quick! Then Pip had a break and it was just the wire and colour bands to go. Pip had already looked at the ColourYourSmile website before our appointment and picked out the colours she liked. Below is an image of what the colours look like on the website and in real life. Lovely!

Now the braces are on, there’s the adjustment period. The hardest part is the first 2-3 days. I’ll list what I did to help my daughter with the transition to wearing braces.

1. Prepare well. Exploring the ColourYourSmile and PaintYourSmile.com  websites are a good way to do this. It puts a positive spin on getting braces and let’s them play with colours.
2. Give relief. I gave my daughter Nurofen before the application appointment.
3. Focus on comfort. I kept up pain medication for the first two days, as recommended by the orthodontist.
4. Provide information. We are going through Ethos Orthodontics and they are brilliant with kids. They provide heaps of easy to understand information, along with a bag of tools to help children look after their braces/teeth.
5. Adjust. Food can be a bit of an issue. For example, you can’t just bite down into a juicy apple; they need to be cut up into small pieces. For the first two days, I gave my daughter tuckshop money for school (which is a treat in itself) so she could buy whatever she felt like and could manage. That seemed to really help. Then at home, I asked her what she thought she could mange, even though I cringed that it was mostly 2-minute noodles (which I rarely buy).

I was surprised how quickly the discomfort settled down. The second day was the worst, third day was not great either, but after that, as Pip says in the video, “it just feels natural”.

This is a review post. You can read my review policy here.