Summer is here! This is the perfect weather for outdoor picnics and sports. And what better way to spend your time outdoors than to participate in all manners of games!
As parents you already understand the necessity of ensuring your child’s participation in team and individual sports. They help develop social and motor skills, inculcate a sense of competition and team spirit besides developing bonds and friendships that will last time for a lifetime! Sports are a complete win for your child’s overall development.
However, as healthy as sports can be, one needs to be always careful. Traditionally, depending on the kind of sport, we ensure our kids wear adequate protective gear like knee pads, helmets, cleats, and eyewear and so on. However, one necessary protective gear that is often overlooked is mouth guard. Sport mouth guards cover your entire teeth and gums to protecting them from any damage from collision and impact. This means whether you are playing a contact sport like soccer, football or wrestling, or playing solo like acrobatics or cycling, if there is any risk of brunt collision or contact that can affect your face or jaw, you need to be equipped with a sport mouth guard to ensure our teeth and gums are always protected.
In case you are wondering if you really need this, think about what happens when while your child is running towards the goal line and another player tackles him or her and manages to hurt your child in the mouth. Without a mouth guard in place, there is high likelihood that you will require immediate dental attention. However, in the said situation, if your child was prepared with a custom-fit sport mouth guard, you could be relaxed knowing they are protected. When playing an aggressive sport, a mouth guard can mean the difference between putting your teeth and gums in the line of fire and protecting them.
So, what do sport mouth guards do? How do they protect? Sport guards are covering for your entire teeth and gums that ensure that teeth do not collide or grind into each other. As a natural reflex, our bones and muscles tend to clench together when we sense an impact. Thus when your jaw senses an oncoming impact, it automatically reacts. Depending on the intensity of impact, this can hurt your teeth, gums or even tongue. When you have a sport guard in place, it acts as a barrier between your upper and lower jaw as well as covers your jaw line to ensure a buffer that absorbs that impact.
Another important thing to remember is comfort. While there are plenty of ready to use sport guards available on store shelves, they are not designed for your teeth. Besides being uncomfortable, they can also be ineffective. That is why, we recommend, getting custom fit sport mouth guards that ensure complete coverage as well as protection.
Reach out to Village Park Family Dental today to understand how sport guards can help protect YOUR teeth!