Child Rejects the Toothbrush? Speech Therapist on Oral Sensitivity
Ming, a speech therapist, explains why kids reject toothbrushes: oral sensitivity and tactile defensiveness affect many children, including autistic ones. He walks through gradual desensitization: let the child brush you first, explore the brush with their hands, slowly move it toward their mouth without forcing, and reward small wins. One parent wrapped a baby wipe around the brush and slowly removed it until their child accepted the real thing.
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Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com I'm a speech therapist. Today we want to talk about toothbrush and why your child rejects it, they're scared of it, so on, so forth, okay? So first of all, you need to understand there's something called oral sensitivity, okay? And there's a difference between oral sensitivity and what we call tactile defensiveness. Don't worry, I'm going to explain to you, okay? So your child's mouth might be more sensitive than you and I, okay? Everyone has a different sensory profile, especially those that are on the, on autism spectrum. I'm not saying that's the only people who will have this problem. There are loads of children out there who have, like, even, like adults. We have different sensory profiles. Okay? So some people are okay, like, eating certain foods or listening to loud sounds or whatever. Some people have different tolerances to certain sensories. They're more ticklish, they're more whatever. So it's the same with oral sensitivity, okay? So oral sensitivity is something that we cannot really understand unless we try on a, A, a person, okay? And because of that, maybe when we're, when we're helping a child brush their teeth or do whatever, it was too, too sensitive for them. So therefore they got a bad experience out of brushing teeth, and then they started to have a defensiveness against it, like a tactile defensiveness right after anyone had a bad experience, something we tried to avoid that, okay? And this is what happens to children. And you can see this tactile defensiveness. It just means that whenever you try to touch them in a certain place, they just try to run off. They scream or they push you away. And this is what tactile defenseless is. Usually it's rather emotional. It's like, oh, I had this feeling before, and I don't want it to feel like this ever again. So they're like, I'm, oh, toothbrush, no can do. I don't want it anymore. Right? So how do we go about it? So we can desensitize the toothbrush, okay? So the tactile defensiveness, it's like the feeling fear of it is tied towards the object itself. So that's a problem. So what we do, like how to desensitize it, meaning we systematically make sure that they understand that the toothbrush is harmless. So what we do first is we allow the child to brush your teeth, okay, With a toothbrush. So it's not always that he is the victim or she's like the person who receives from you. And it shows him or her how it looks like from your perspective and let them know that, oh, actually, I can also do it on mom and dad. And that's great, right? So it's also helps you to, like, demonstrate firsthand that it doesn't hurt anyone. Okay. And it's easy for the child to see. Oh, when you're brushing and they're going, and then you're actually okay. Right. And it becomes easier to. For them to reciprocate and say that, oh, yeah, it's my turn now. And then you take turns and it's fun like that. After that, it's not like, immediately you can go in and touch their mouth and shove the toothbrush into your child's mouth. The next thing you should do is to systematically and slowly advance the toothbrush closer and closer to the mouth. Okay. And there's a lot of psychological theory behind it. It's not a lot. It's just. It just means, like, if. If you slowly increase, you. You get someone to do something that is of a lower difficulty or something that I can tolerate slowly, you can increase the difficulty and the intrusiveness of. Of your demands. Right. It's just like anything in the world. Right? So what you do is, like, you tell your child to touch the toothbrush with his hands or her hands, and then slowly, like, brush it up slowly. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up here and up to the neck, up to the face, up to the lips, around, and then right outside, and then go in. Okay? So slowly go up and up and up. And every time you see that, your child becomes, like, defensive about it, you should stop. Okay. And let them know that it's safe. And you say, it's fine. It's okay. Okay, got it, got it. No, no more. Right, Good. All right, that's cool. Right? So slowly move up until you get to inside the mouth. Do not do it in one go slowly go up, stop before they get pissed off, and then just pick off where it was right before and slowly go up again. Nine times out of 10, this is going to work. All right? And something you have to remember is to reward good behavior. I see a lot of parents out there and also therapists, they think when they're doing this kind of oral sensitivity or massage, whatever, they think that, oh, I don't need to reward anything because this is just something that is very normal, very natural. Just everyday life for you and I, we might have taken brushing teeth for granted. Right? But at the same time, you have to remember it was Very hard for them. They didn't like it, they hated it. We're trying to like push something into their life that they don't want. So therefore we have to reward it. And every time you advance closer to the child's mouth and they have went further than they had before, you should reward. Okay? It's not only after they brushed and then they reward. That's too long for the kid. It's not worth it. So basically what you can do is rewarding the tolerance towards what we're doing to them, right? So it sounds negative, but it is, it is what it is negative, right? They, they never asked to brush the teeth and they don't understand why. They don't understand about hygiene either. So anyways, so, so as long as you get closer and closer and every time it gets closer, you should reward. And how do you reward is you can let them watch some. Something on the screen, right? On the iPad, whatever. You can let them like drink something. You can actually ask them to eat something as well. Because like we're not brushing them to teeth yet. And then anyways, after they eat even better, we can just brush it off, right? And it can be anything you want. It could be toys, it could be like music, just anything your child enjoys. You can use it inside of the bathroom, so on, so forth, right? And something you have to remember, maybe don't do it in the bathroom because number one is echoey. Number two, it might be already associated with like bad experiences. So maybe you can start off in the living room and then after, when he's okay with brushing in the living room, move back to bathroom like that, okay? So remember, no pulling, no holding, no. Or pinning down. That's the worst that can happen to a kid. All right? I've had some kids who come my way who have had really bad experiences. And because being pinned down, held down, it was really hard for me to like desensitize the child. Okay. And I've done this for loads of cases, right, Because I'm a speech therapist and I do a lot of oral stuff, right? So at the end of the day, you have to make it easy for everyone. Do not force it on a kid. And I've got an extreme case, like a 30 year old who still to this day, what doesn't like anything inside of her mouth. And that's because of all the bad experiences she had as a kid, right? So now we finally got to somewhere where we can start moving on and work on her sensitivity. But it took a long time to desensitize all right, so let's talk about real life experience. The method that we talked about works for other things as well, such as haircuts. Like if your child is scared of razors or like whatever or scissors, then we've used this method loads of times for a lot of stuff, like for face masks, for, I don't know, just wearing shoes, even like wearing socks. It's easy as long as you follow the steps that I've laid out above. Okay. We outline the method in full detail and you can see other successful parent testimonials inside of our full introduction course for parents. So you can go to agents of sweet.com course for that. I might put the link down below if you so choose to. And then let's talk about a real life example of a child that we tried this process like around half a year ago. And the child, child tried this process. But no matter how much the parent tried the toothbrush sensation was too much for her. Even if the parent bought the softest toothbrush out there. Like the hair, like horse hair, what rabbit hair, whatever. Or like silicon brushy thing that's super soft. I even touched it myself. But she didn't like it. The only thing that she could accept was like the tea cleaning wipes for babies. So what we did was that. Look, it's not like, it's not foolproof. We gotta troubleshoot and like, you gotta ask me, ask like speech therapists, not, not just me, right, Anyone. And think about how to do it better. So what we did was we wrapped the wipe around a toothbrush and we started from the beginning. And every time we did it and desensitize her and like did it on different, like daddy and mommy and then, and then like a. What's that called? A doll. And then slowly we moved the. We exposed more and more of the toothbrush, right? We cut off the wipes and maybe like half of the toothbrush is with like, is wrapped by the wipe and half of it was naked and exposed. So slowly we got rid of the wipe, like slowly desensitizing it. And then it worked. And now they're using toothbrush normal, like just every day. All right, so that's the end of this video. If you found it helpful, please let me know. And if you have any questions, just put it down below. And if you haven't, Please go to agentsofspeech.com Checklist for free home therapy list of tools and toys that I recommend that you get when you start therapy at home. Okay, so that's all for this video, let me know and I will see you next week. Bye. Bye.
