Dr. Wendie Trubow explains how to prevent crowded teeth in children ages 3-12. Dysfunctional mouth muscles cause inward jaw growth. The fix: myofunctional therapy exercises to retrain muscles, plus guidance appliances worn one hour daily and overnight to reposition the tongue and redirect growth outward.
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What do we do to develop that jaw? So we'll talk about that age range, 3 to 12. To get the muscles to work, we have different things we can do. Now, one of them is myofunctional therapy. So myofunctional therapy is specifically working with jaw muscles, the entire head and neck, to train and educate those muscles so they rest and function properly. It also develops proper strength of those muscles because a lot of the dysfunctional musculature, it's not resting properly, it's not functioning properly. There's also weakness in there too. So if we work with myofunctional therapists and have a child do therapy for the jaws, we can help those muscles to grow the jaws. But then the second component are what we call guidance appliances. But what the guide does when a child wears it, we ask them to wear it 1 hour a day plus overnight, and it is a trainer. Basically, when the child pops the guide in, it's designed to guide that tongue to function properly, meaning the tongue's going to go to the roof of the mouth. And when the tongue gets to the roof of the mouth and exerts pressure, that's how we start growing outward. But then that guide also redirects the lips and cheeks. The dysfunctional pattern is that the tongue is not doing enough. The lips and cheeks are doing too much. They compensate to help the tongue. But when the inside is weak, like the tongue not doing its job, and the lips and cheeks are strong, we kind of grow inwards or shrink. That's what makes the teeth crowded. So we don't want our lips and cheeks doing too much. We need them doing less. So the guide gets the tongue doing its job and takes away the lip and cheek function, redirect the balance, redirect the growth.
