More than straight teeth for kids
Dear friends with children,
Do you plan to get braces for your kids? Will they get 4 teeth extracted? Are they going to have their wisdom teeth removed? There is an alternative. Myofunction and orthotropics is an alternative to orthodontics that emphasizes prevention over the cure. It’s cheaper, healthier, and makes your kids’ faces more beautiful.
What’s the main cause of crowded teeth inside a small jaw that affects most of us? Is it nature or nurture? There’s a twin study that suggests that nurture has more to do with it.
Studying old skulls before the modern diet demonstrates that it could be an underdevelopment of the jaw.
It’s not just diets, it’s how you breathe and position the tongue and lips. The facial muscles affect the bones over time.
When we rest with the tongue dropped from the roof of the mouth, the cheek and lips exert a small but constant force inwards. Just like how braces move the teeth with gradual force, the cheeks and lips cave the teeth in. The opposing force is the tongue. This is called mewing, or myofunction.
But the cavemen with perfect teeth didn’t have therapists to tell them how to rest their tongue. How did they get straight teeth? It turns out that in their days, microwave meals or refined carbohydrates did not exist; they had to chew ~20x more than us with our modern diets. Every time they ate, was a mouth and jaw workout.
Mewing has been a social media sensation for some time, so there are plenty of resources to help adults. But what about my kids?
Recommendation for toddlers
- Give kids tougher foods that exercise their mouth
- For carbs, prefer hard crackers and seeds over rice, bread, pasta, noodles.
- For protein, prefer bone-in meats such as chicken wings and ribs over boneless meat
- Instead of soft desserts, serve hard or dried fruit
- Teach & enforce proper eating habits
- Sit up straight, not hunched over the food
- Lips closed, chin slightly tucked
- Swallow with the tongue instead of sucking with the cheeks
- Chew on both sides, using the tongue to pass the food
- Chew things even when not eating
- Sugarless gum
- Chew toys
- Maintain sleeping hygiene
- Ventilate bedroom to prevent mouth breathing from excess CO2
- Sleep on back, do not use a pillow
- More tips
By developing the facial muscles, the maxmilla will naturally grow outwards. This will increase the volume of the nasal cavity, enabling better sleep, exercise, and cognitive function. It develops a more square, attractive face with pronounced cheekbones. It enables perfect posture. It’s more than just straight teeth.
I hope that this introduction to the subject will get you started on your own research towards raising your kids to be healthier, smarter, and more beautiful.