One of the most important check-ups your child can have is the one with the orthodontist in Harley Street to determine whether or not they will need braces to correctly align their teeth.
In modern dentistry, the age at which the orthodontist in Harley Street can treat children has become much younger, and so therefore has the orthodontic check-up. It is now possible for the orthodontist to predict how the adult teeth will come through and therefore braces can be used to guide the teeth into their correct position rather than to reposition them once they are already in place.
Starting younger with braces
The modern orthodontist, such as we have at Harley Street Dental Clinic, can carry out this initial check-up when your child’s first adult teeth have started to come through, usually around the age of seven. This means that treatment can start at around nine years of age, and be over before your child hits adolescence, which is when their levels of self-conscious will skyrocket for a few years and seeming out of the ordinary in any way will be excruciating for them.
Children often need to have fixed braces that cannot come off and get lost and are less prone to breakages. They tend to still be made of metal to make them less fragile, but the brackets are often smaller and can be brightened up with coloured elastics.
Treating issues with the bite
Having treatment for bite problems is also best when carried out young. If the jaw is too narrow to accommodate all the teeth neatly, the traditional solution has been to wait until the adult teeth come through, then extract a few and straighten up the rest. But this results in a smaller bite and a big, wide grin is far more attractive than a narrow mealy-mouthed smile.
Treating bite issues is easy as long as the bones of the jaw are malleable. They set hard around the age of 18 years, so the earlier the treatment, the more plastic the bone, and the orthodontist in Harley Street can use appliances to wide the jaw and so accommodate all the teeth.