Dental 4 Less, Tips for Reducing Children Dental Anxiety – Relaxation
If your child is visibly anxious or reports feeling anxious to the dentist, relaxation strategies can be quite useful. Many children will experience relief following a simple deep-breathing exercise, which involves deep inhalation and slow exhalation. Have your child to pretend to blow bubbles through a wand, doing so will produce a similar effect and sometimes provides distraction as well.
Another, somewhat more time-consuming approach, involves progressive muscle relaxation. Specifically, the child systematically tenses and relaxes each muscle group in the body. The child reclines in the dental chair with arms by his or her side and eyes closed. The child is then asked to tense and relax each group of muscles in sequence, starting from the right toes and progressing to include the right heel, ankle, calf, knee, thigh, and hip. The child then repeats the exercise on the left side of the body. The right and left arm are then tensed and relaxed, followed by the shoulders, neck, jaws, cheeks, forehead, eyes, and scalp. Finally, the child is asked to focus on his or her breaking and relaxing the muscles in the chest and abdomen. If you ever taken a yoga class you may have done this same thing at the end of the class.