Dr. Wendie Trubow lists signs a child might be breathing through their mouth: bedwetting, ear infections, teeth grinding, night sweats, restless sleep, and frequent waking. Many parents miss the connection, treating each symptom separately instead of recognizing poor nasal breathing as the root cause.
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Are there other signs about mouth breathing? Is there anything else parents would look for, or even people look for in themselves that would indicate, oh, this is a mouth breather? What would you— what do you see?
But another thing a parent might recognize are— and it's kind of a long list of symptoms, but at the top of that list would be behavioral changes or issues. So behavioral changes are definitely related to the sleeping and breathing. So we have basically, okay, I might notice my child has their mouth open or breathing. If not, what about behavioral changes? Then bedwetting. Bedwetting is fairly common. Then we talk about ear infections because kids are getting ear infections, and that is related to jaw growth and development and how our muscles are working. We talk a lot about grinding teeth because that's another one parents know right away. They can hear their child, that kind of, ooh, nails on the chalkboard kind of sound is grating, but they know their kids are grinding their teeth. So sweating at night, a lot of parents recognize their kids are sweating at night. The pillow is soaked. Restless sleep, lots of movement, kicking and hitting. Parents who have kids waking up in the middle of the night. So maybe they're not noticing or observing their kids sleeping and their mouth is open or not. They might not know. But what if your child wakes up once or twice a night and comes and disturbs you? Well, you know that's happening. So waking up at night is one of those. There's this long list of symptoms that are downstream from poor breathing, and a lot of parents are struggling with that list of symptoms.
