Anterior Repair for Children

If your child has suffered damage to their front teeth, such as chips, cracks, or breaks, our pediatric dental office can help restore their smile.

This is what we call anterior tooth repair. While that’s the medical term, it refers to a variety of restorative measures you might be more familiar with. We’ll highlight some of those below.

Pediatric Crowns To Repair Damaged Teeth

Dental crowns can be a good solution for damaged front teeth. Damage can come from sports injuries (collisions), biting hard food, or from decay that progressively gets worse until the tooth is painful.

Crowns work by being placed onto the damaged tooth after the tooth has been cleaned and prepared. Crowns serve both to restore the appearance of the tooth, but also strengthen it and prevent further damage.

If your child’s tooth has been chipped or perhaps broken in half, which can happen from impact, crowns are a viable way to restore the tooth to its original look and function.

Generally parents opt for dental crowns for their kids when it’s an adult tooth (or teeth) that require repair. When it’s a baby tooth, quite often it’s simpler to extract the tooth and wait for the adult tooth to take its place.

The caveat to extracting baby teeth is that, depending on your child’s age, the adult tooth may not erupt in that space for a while. If it’s multiple teeth that would need to be extracted, that can make chewing or speaking potentially difficult if they’re removed and the gap remains for a year or more.

Adult teeth come in at their own pace, and don’t come in faster if we remove the baby tooth above them early. This is something to keep in mind, is all.

Veneers & Other Restorative Measures

If your child’s tooth is cracked, it’s important to address it promptly. Those cracks can get infected and lead to much more serious problems for your child — not to mention more painful.

The other priority is that a cracked tooth has lost its structural integrity. Any pressure from chewing or even the tongue bumping it could cause it to split further or break apart. That will take an uncomfortable situation to an emergency one very quickly.

Cracks in the teeth can also lead to new places for bacteria and “sugar bugs” to build up, which is another reason to address it promptly.

While modern restorative measures have come a long way, it’s important to know that no treatment is as strong as the tooth was originally. Once the tooth loses its initial integrity, though veneers and crowns help protect it against further damage, there’s always potential for that tooth to crack or chip again.

We often say, “These teeth are for smiling only!” so be careful when biting into your next candied apple.