Sealants
Sealants help to protect your teeth from awful sugar bugs! Sugar bugs can stick on your teeth if you don’t brush and floss properly every day. They are bad for your teeth because they eat away parts of your teeth, and sometimes they can make your tooth hurt.
Baby teeth will fall out when you reach a certain age, but adult teeth will come in and fill the spot where your baby teeth was. These adult teeth are with you for the rest of your life! So it is important to take care of them and make sure they are healthy and clean.
To protect your adult teeth, we put sealants on them, especially the back adult teeth that are hard to reach with your toothbrush. Sealants are like raincoats! They cover the teeth and make sure that the sugar bugs can’t get to them.
Sealants are very easy to put on your teeth. Here are the steps!
1. First, we put a little blue “shampoo” on your teeth called Etch, and this makes sure that your teeth are nice and clean. We wash that shampoo away with lots of water, just like in the shower.
2. Then we dry the tooth with lots of air, because we need it to be super dry to work. Sometimes, we use cotton rolls near your tongue so that your tongue doesn’t accidentally touch the tooth.
3. We put on the sealants (here comes the raincoat!) with a paintbrush.
4. We blow dry the sealants with a special light.
Then your sealants are in! Sometimes we have to do this for more than one tooth, but it’s the same easy four steps!
The sealants may taste a little sour at the end, so we will rinse you with lots of water. The important thing is to help keep your mouth dry by staying open and not moving your tongue around. Once the sealants are on, they will help protect your teeth from those nasty sugar bugs! But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to floss and brush anymore. You still do, because the sealants can’t do all the work! So keep up good brushing and flossing, and your adult teeth will be happy , safe, and healthy!