Healthy Start Program Specialists

What is the 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 the New Jersey Dental Specialists team performs a comprehensive exam. They 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. 

What are the benefits of the Healthy Start Program?

The Healthy Start Program at New Jersey Dental Specialists 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. The 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 many types. It can correct your child’s overbite, underbite, crossbite, and other imbalances. 

What can the Healthy Start Program treat or correct?

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:

• 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. 

To learn more about the Healthy Start Program and what it can do for your child, call New Jersey Dental Specialists or book a consultation online today.