Do baby teeth really matter? Changing parental perception and increasing dental care utilization for young children.

INTRODUCTION: Parent/caregivers' inability to recognize the importance of baby teeth has been associated with inadequate self-management of children's oral health (i.e. lower likelihood of preventive dental visits) which may result in dental caries and the need for more expensive caries-related restorative treatment under general anesthesia. Health behavior theories aid researchers in understanding the impact and effectiveness of interventions on changing health behaviors and health outcomes. One example is the Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation (CSM) which focuses on understanding an individual's illness perception (i.e. illness and treatment representations), and subsequently has been used to develop behavioral interventions to change inaccurate perceptions and describe the processes involved in behavior change.

METHODS: We present two examples of randomized clinical trials that are currently testing oral health behavioral interventions to change parental illness perception and increase dental utilization for young children disproportionately impacted by dental caries in elementary schools and pediatric primary care settings. Additionally, we compared empiric data regarding parent/caregiver perception of the chronic nature of dental caries (captured by the illness perception questionnaire revised for dental: IPQ-RD constructs: identity, consequences, control, timeline, illness coherence, emotional representations) between parent/caregivers who did and did not believe baby teeth were important.

RESULTS: Caregivers who believed that baby teeth don't matter had significantly (P<0.05) less accurate perception in the majority of the IPQ-RD constructs (except timeline construct) compared to caregivers who believed baby teeth do matter.

CONCLUSION: These findings support our CSM-based behavioral interventions to modify caregiver caries perception, and improve dental utilization for young children.