Children's Oral Habits Can Affect Facial Growth

There is an average perception among common people that crooked, crowded teeth and facial development problems are hereditary.

Orthodontists believe that oral habits can lead to future orthodontic and facial development problems.

Fortunately for parents and their children, various orthodontic treatments can help children break unhealthy oral habits or correct there effects before they become too advanced.

Types of oral habits that may need correction include:

o Mouth breathing
o Prolonged sucking on pacifiers, the thumb or fingers
o Overactive lip muscles
o Tongue thrusting
o Nail biting

According to studies of world leader in dental appliance technology, the jaw's posture effects its growth, children who breathe through their mouths can adversely affect how their jaws develop.

According to this studies, people who breathe through their mouths tend to develop long, narrow faces, so the earlier this problem can be corrected, the better. Mouth breathers also can develop TMJ disorder or soft tissue dysfunction.

Sucking on the thumb, fingers or a pacifier is common in early childhood development. But for children who do not gradually outgrow this habit, future adverse dental affects can result.

Several studies have shown that, a normal upper arch forms when the tongue rests in the "roof" of the mouth because the tongue helps combat the pressure of the cheeks, which naturally push against the teeth and can push the upper arch of the jaws inward. When a child does anything to force the tongue to drop from the roof of the mouth, such as thumb sucking or mouth breathing, the cheek muscles work over time to push the teeth in the upper jaw inward, creating crowding problems.

In addition, the more intense and frequent the bad oral habits are, the greater the possibility of malocclusion. They believe that, One way of combating the ill effect of thumb and finger-sucking is through "orthodontic pacifiers.

Orthodontists say that this type of pacifier is specially designed to replicate the shape of a mother's nipple when flattened in the baby's mouth and to support the shape of the baby's palate and jaws as they develop. This scientific design also encourages the most natural sucking action to help proper oral development.

Tongue thrusting can lead to misalignment teeth by exerting more force on the backs of the teeth than is applied to the fronts of the teeth by the facial muscles. Conversely, overactive lips can cause teeth to tip inward if the tongue doesn't provide enough force to combat it.

There is a variety of devices beside orthodontic pacifiers that orthodontist can use to correct poor oral habits in young children. These appliances are used before, during and after orthodontic treatment to correct the problems that lead to crowded, crooked teeth and malformed faces. The appliances sometimes serve as deterrents to the bad habits by taking away the pleasant sensation the child gets from, sucking his/her thumb say Orthodontists.