Healthy Start Program

The Healthy Start Program is a dental treatment plan for kids who experience problems with crooked teeth. Often, these issues are substantial enough to stop your child from breathing easily, especially while they sleep. These lapses in breath can affect your child’s oral health and development.

This program is unique because it works with the natural growth of your child’s skull and jaw to straighten the teeth. Your child gets a series of custom oral appliances that meet their needs after our team performs a comprehensive exam. We customize your child’s devices based on the underlying problems you’d like to treat.

The Healthy Start Program can reduce or eliminate your child’s need for more extensive orthodontic care, such as braces or orthodontic surgery, in the future.

The Healthy Start Program at Dental Specialists of New Jersey can address several specific issues involving the mouth that are common in kids. Your child may have developed crooked teeth naturally or due to habits like thumb-sucking or tongue-thrusting. Our team considers the causes while creating your child’s plan.

The Healthy Start Program:

• Addresses sleep-disordered breathing.
• Promotes breathing from the nose.
• Helps develop the jaw and airway.
• Corrects a tongue thrusting habit.
• Repositions the tongue.
• Reduces thumb sucking habits.
• Corrects malocclusion.

Although correcting malocclusion is just one of many goals that the Healthy Start system can accomplish, it can treat several conditions. It can correct your child’s overbite, underbite, crossbite, and other imbalances.

Each child is unique, so not all kids will need the Healthy Start Program for the same purposes. The results of Healthy Start can improve more childhood conditions than you might expect, including many that have little to do with the mouth. Your child may benefit from the Healthy Start Program if they experience the following:

• Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
• Lower IQ.
• Chronic allergies.
• Aggressiveness or irritability.
• Mouth breathing.
• Crooked teeth.
• Restless sleep.
• Bedwetting.
• Dark circles.
• Nightmares.
• Snoring.
• Arrested growth.

Issues like these may not seem like they have much to do with oral health, but if the alignment of your child’s teeth affects your child’s breathing and quality of sleep, the effects of malocclusion are widespread.