With regard to the causes of the bad breath in children, we can think various factors such as mouth-breathing, the disease of mumps or fever, cavities and so on. The most common one is mouth-breathing among them.

The mouth-breathing is the symptom that you breathe through your open mouth because you cannot do through your nose, and it is said that more than half of Japanese do it. You can see many adults also do it. Nowadays children do it because they tend to eat only soft foods in their dietary habits and their muscles around the tongue and the mouth are not developed. It is important to make them acquire the custom that they keep tightly closing their mouths usually in order to cure the mouth-breathing.

In addition, the custom of brushing of teeth, daily meals, or feeling mental stress will cause bad breath. You should think about the methods to grow up healthily while being careful about the bad breath in children.

7 methods of rearing to care the bad breath in children

Put a child on his back in the bed

When you wake up a child in the morning, does he get grubby around the mouth with drool? Or when he wakes up and describes his symptoms that he has a dry throat or a pain, it is possible to do mouth-breathing when he sleeps at night.

When you do mouth-breathing, the inside of your mouth becomes arid condition and bacteria increase in the mouth because saliva does not circulate Therefore the inside of your mouth gives off smell and you get sick since bacteria grow proliferously.

When a child sleeps at night, put him on his back using a low pillow to prevent bad breath. When he has mouth-breathing due to stuffy nose, you may give him the medicine for stuffy nose or putting on the menthol for children under the nose will make nose breathing possible by the stimulation.

If a child hates it, you should put on a small quantity quickly after his sleeping.

Use a pacifier until the age of 3

You may see more children do mouth breathing in Japan than in Europe and America.

With regard to the cause, there is the perspective that the way of training infants may have a problem.

The nursing baby does not mouth breathing but nose breathing. In the childcare education in Japan, a mother begins to wean a baby around 1 year old and tries to make a baby stop using a pacifier. However, it is said that the orbicular muscle of mouth which plays an important role in nose breathing is completed about 3 years old.

Therefore, given that nose breathing switches to mouth breathing by not using a pacifier, it seems to be still early to quit a pacifier around 1 year old.

However, if a baby has been using a pacifier and comes to chew on it, it causes front teeth to gradually come out. We can say that it is difficult to choose the timing of quitting it.

Brush your children’s teeth

The causes of bad breath in children mostly relate to tooth staining. What you ate orally are fermented and often cause the bad breath. However, if the age of children advances to a certain degree, they can do brushing of teeth by themselves but is very difficult for infants. When you polish your child’s teeth, you requires attention to the upper front teeth (deciduous central incisor teeth). Since the upper front teeth are particularly sensitive, a child will extremely hate being touched even by a parent in many cases.

You do not need to polish them roughly at a stretch. You would rather wipe off stains with gauze because he might come to hate brushing of teeth.

You may get irritated with a child without being able to brush his teeth, but most of children intend to open their mouths without hating brushing of teeth by the age of 3. Try to make an effort with patience.

Do not use toothpaste

When you are concerned about the bad breath in children, many of you may think it better to use toothpaste because the smell clears away. But, in the case of a small child, he often swallows it without spitting it out and it may adversely affect him if it enters the body through the mouth.

The ingredients such as the synthetic surfactant harmful to the body and the foaming agent to improve bubbling.are included in commercially available toothpaste. It might be the cause of unfinished brushing since you do not clearly see the teeth bubbling too much in the mouth. Therefore you may not use toothpaste.

However, if you are anyway concerned about the bad breath and want to use the toothpaste, it is recommended that you should use additive-free toothpaste.

Cure stomatitis

When the gums are swollen by stomatitis, it causes the bad breath. Once the inside of the mouth is in an insanitary condition, it is easy to get stomatitis. At first you let your children do brushing of teeth or gargling after the meal and take care to keep clean in their mouth.

However, in the case of small children such as infants, it will be difficult to let them gargle or to use the ointment. It is effective for reducing swelling of stomatitis to serve the foods with many vitamins as one of the therapeutic methods to cure stomatitis.

You should eat such a lot of food as pork, eel, wheat, or brown rice which contains a lot of vitamin B1. In fact, the children who are in the physical condition easy to get stomatitis happen to have a bad breath also. It is important to review whole daily life in order to spend a regular life, or to be careful of children’s health and to review nutritional balance of children, sleeping hours and so on.

Be careful about a cold

When you come down with a cold, the air passage becomes infected with bacteria or virus due to have a weakened immune system and you are in the condition that various germs easily grow proliferously in your mouth.

When a child says “I have a sore throat,” it causes the bad breath because various germs are in his throat. If a fever is present, he has a bad breath because the temperature in the mouth rises and the throat dries.

When he catches a cold, has a sore throat and has a fever, let him get a rest and give him a restful feeling. In addition, it is important to receive hydration in order to improve the immunity and the resistance.

The recommended drinks to receive hydration are water and isotonic drinks. Please note that you cannot prevent bad breath with the high-sugar drinks such as carbonated drinks or juice.

Prevent bad breath with having a snack

The bad breath becomes strongest in 3 hours after a meal. Because the foods begin to go bad in the mouth about 3 hours later after eating, and at that time the secretion of saliva which gets rid of smell comes to decrease.

You should eat something before becoming hungry in order to prevent bad breath. If you eat snacks at 10:00 and 15:00, you can prevent it since saliva is secreted. In fact the act that a small children eat snacks leads to the bad breath prevention.

With regard to the contents of the snack, hard rice cracker or dried cuttlefish will be recommended as saliva comes out with chewing well. Since it causes a cavity to eat a lot of snacks containing snack sugar, avoid eating them. And if you determine the snack time, the time of a meal will be done and the rhythm of daily life can be done as well.

How about things mentioned above?

When the bad breath in children is still strong even if you perform the bad breath prevention possible to do at home, you should consult a dentist or an otolaryngologist and talk about it. As for having knowledge as parents, even if you are concerned about the bad breath in children, you should avoid smelling children’s mouths several times because it will be stressful for them.

Even a child who is small and cannot yet peak well will perceive it with the atmosphere of mother sensitivity and come to be worried about the bad breath of his own.

In the future he will become concerned about it abnormally and the case of getting the disease called “Olfactory reference syndrome (Fear of having an unpleasant body odor)” as he cannot get it off of his mind could occur.

In front of the child it is important to prevent from giving excessive pressure without showing the look of being concerned about it if possible. As for bad breath, anyone has it though there is the difference in the degree of the smell. Mother should contact with the child without becoming nervous too much.

Summary

7 methods of rearing to care the bad breath in children

・ Put a child on his back in the bed
・ Use a pacifier until the age of 3
・ Brush your child’s teeth
・ Do not use toothpaste
・ Cure stomatitis
・ Be careful about a cold
・ Prevent bad breath with having a snack