Many parents do not understand how vital excellent dental health is to their kid’s performance in school. These parents ignore their children’s oral health when preparing them for school and pay attention to other parts of their children’s lives, like their physical health and more. This mistake is born from ignorance for some parents because they are unaware of how oral health can impact their child’s general health.
However, understanding the connection between oral and general health is vital to understanding the connection between oral health and student success. How does oral health impact our general health? In answering this question, we can all agree that most oral health issues are highlighted by nagging pain, which can affect your school performance if the pain is not treated or addressed.
The experience is no different for children. Professional children’s dentists like the Massapequa Park dentist, Dr. Feldman, note that oral health issues are among the various issues affecting a child’s educational performance. This article will highlight how oral health issues can affect a student’s success, given the connection between oral health and the student’s general lifestyle. This article will also discuss how to prevent and treat oral health issues for students. Read on for more eye-opening information.
How Oral Health Impacts Students’ Success
Understanding how oral health impacts students’ performance is crucial in understanding the connection between oral health and students’ success. As mentioned earlier, most oral health issues are accompanied by nagging pains. These pains can almost always negatively impact a student’s performance in school. The impact is seen in the following ways:
- Missing school: Poor oral health affects the student’s general health, also impacting the student’s school performance. Research studies have shown that 20% of students are absent from school because they struggle with oral health. Hence, they avoid school to address their oral health issues, especially when experiencing pain. Learning and assimilating information while struggling with nagging pain caused by oral health issues is challenging.
- Poor grades: As mentioned earlier, when students miss lectures, it will affect them in the future. On most occasions, the result of missing school is poor grades. Most people will agree that poor health equals poor grades, and dental health impacts general health; thus, poor oral health translates to a dip in general health, resulting in poor grades.
- Poor social life: Social life is essential to every student’s learning process. Having a circle of friends you can exchange ideas with makes it easier to understand what is being taught in a course or lecture. Research shows that people with bad oral health experience difficulty building relationships; thus, their social life is not at as good as it could be. The same can be said for students with poor oral health because they will experience difficulty socializing. This can also affect them psychologically.
Tips to Improve Oral Health for Students’ Success
The issues of poor oral health can be resolved with the appropriate tips. These tips ensure that students can maintain excellent oral health, thus, increasing their chances of academic success. These tips include:
- Conduct regular dental checkups: Parents should develop the habit of helping their children build an excellent relationship with dentists by scheduling regular visits. These visits help spot dental issues at their early stage as well as treat and correct some dental problems
- Adopt oral health habits at home: Besides regular doctor visits, students should also play their part by adopting and practicing excellent oral health habits in their homes. Some of these oral habits include brushing twice daily using toothpaste recommended by their dentist, reducing the intake of sugary foods, and other oral health guidelines specified by a dentist.
- Checking their child’s oral health: At the beginning of this article, it was highlighted that some parents are ignorant of the need to check their child’s oral health. However, parents should understand that not all kids are vocal when they notice something uncomfortable in their bodies; thus, parents should include oral health checks in their daily routine when preparing their kids for school.
Conclusion
Suppose you had doubts about how oral health is connected to a student’s success. In that case, you can say that this article exists to help eliminate those doubts as it has highlighted the significant ways poor oral health impacts students’ success, among other things.
