Dana Obleman: Hi there. I’m Dana Obleman and welcome to this week’s video blog. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about a common problem that most parents have with their child somewhere in the toddler years. That’s the issue of brushing their teeth. I can remember going through it with all three of my children. A period of time where all three of them resisted the idea of having their teeth brushed. Very rarely have I ever met a child who willingly and happily accepts this.

Eventually they will, but not at the beginning. I think it’s they have to sit still for a period of time. There’s something in their mouth and that could be a strange feeling initially, but in my opinion, and I hope in yours too, brushing your teeth is not negotiable. Brushing your teeth has to happen and it has to happen every single day. So because there’s no way out of this, let’s try to make it as easy as possible on everyone involved.

One of my favorite strategies that I did with all three of my kids was to say when it’s time to brush teeth, get them in a spot that’s eye level with you. So up on the counter obviously with you very close by so that you can communicate face to face and talk about what’s going to happen with this toothbrush.

I always said to my children, even from before they were one. Again, their understanding is very, very high even though they can’t verbally communicate with you. Their comprehension skills are high. They can understand some simple directions here.

I would say to my child, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is you open your mouth, mommy brushes your teeth, then you get a turn. You can brush your teeth and then we’re done and we can move on.” The hard way is, “Mommy has to hold your chin, force the toothbrush into your mouth. You start to cry and we don’t have any fun together.”

Guess what? Lots of times we had to do it the hard way because again, this is happening. It’s happening one way or the other. We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way. The more we did this and the more I said, “Easy way or hard way,” the more they started to pick the easy way.

The interesting thing about children learning consequences is that it doesn’t really go in an uphill direction as consistently as we tend to think. It moves in the direction of progress and then you have a day where you feel like you’re back to square one and then up you go again and then another little regression. That’s basically your child’s way of just making sure that rules are rules and they stay the rule.

It would be lovely if they just decided easy way it is and you never had to revisit this issue ever again, but I’m telling you nothing in parenting works that way. You’re going to have to revisit this often, but the good news is you’re going to have more easy days than you’re going to have hard.

Easy way. Hard way. I’m promising you they will eventually start picking the easy way. Now a lot of toddlers, they want to explore. They’re all about learning new things. They often want to do it. They’ll take it right out of your hand and attempt to do it themselves, but obviously a one year old is not going to brush her teeth properly or thoroughly enough. That’s OK.

Again, it can be a bit of a reward at the end of the tooth brushing. We pick the easy way. Mommy does it first. Then you get to do it or daddy does it first and then you get to do it. If they choose the hard way though, they don’t get to do it. You do it and we’re done.

That can be just setting a little bit of positive reinforcement into the situation so that more often than not they choose the easy way so they get the reward of being able to do it themselves as well. I have a similar approach to the issue of sunscreen. Again, I don’t know if it was just my kids, but all three of my children around the two year mark absolutely hated to have sunscreen put on.

Again, my answer was we can do this the easy way where you cooperate and we get it done quickly and we move onto something fun. Or we do it the hard way where mommy has to hold you and get the sunscreen on and you’re not going to have a good time and neither is mommy. The more you do this, the more they start choosing the easy way because sunscreen is non negotiable as well.

In my house, tooth brushing, sunscreen, and sleep are all non negotiables. You have to stand firm behind at least a few things in life, right? You can give in a little here and there about other issues, but you need to decide, in your mind, what are some non negotiables in your house? Once you’ve got those in place, then you push forward with this to teach your children that you mean business, at least around some things.

Thanks for watching. Sleep well.