Is Nightime Teeth Grinding Bad For Small Children?
Saturday, October 18th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Have you ever tiptoed into your child’s room during the night expecting to hear the sweet sounds of slumber and instead been greeted by the sound of grinding teeth. Grinding teeth, or Bruxism as it is called, most frequently occurs during sleep at night. Millions of people from all over the world suffer from it and have been searching for ways to stop teeth grinding.
Teeth grinding in small children will often go away on its own as the child gets older and gets used to having teeth. While teeth grinding in adults is usually a sign of stress, in children it is probably more of a habit than anything else. Teeth grinding creates wear on the tooth enamel, which causes cracking and sometimes chipping in the teeth. Grinding your teeth while you are asleep is more of a problem than when you are awake since most people grind their teeth much harder while sleeping. How to stop grinding teeth at night is a problem.
To completely stop teeth grinding you need to do exercises and change parts of your diet. For example, you can purchase countless different mouth guards available in the market today, but they do NOT help stop tooth grinding permanently. The mouth guards just protect the teeth from further damage but do little to solve the problem. Someone who grinds their teeth every night may experience jaw disorders, damaged teeth, and headaches all because of their bruxism. Dentists will rarely tell you how to cure bruxism or how to stop grinding teeth because dentists and the mouth guard businesses would suffer.
Teeth can become sensitive, painful, and loose after they have been worn down or cracked by the grinding. The amount of bite pressure placed on grinding teeth causes the teeth and existing fillings to crack. Your jaw muscles are some of the strongest muscles in you body and over the years a lot of damage can be made to your teeth from grinding. Lots of kids who grind their teeth aren’t even aware of it, so it’s often siblings or parents who identify the problem. Dentists should also be aware of it as they are the ones who would see the grinding damage.
In most cases, grinding teeth is a minor condition that poses no real health threat to a child. In addition to grinding teeth, people with bruxism also may bite their fingernails, pencils and chew the inside of their cheek. While the exact cause is not known, bruxism is clearly associated with stress and certain personality types. Like daytime teeth clenching, bruxism is often considered to be stress-related.
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