Those Evil Sippy Cups….
As a parent you probably don’t associate you child’s sippy cup with evil stuff, do you? Well, according to the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, those innocent looking sippy cups can do great harm to your baby’s teeth and gums.
How? Well, the sippy cups are not really evil in themselves. They need a little helping hand from parents and caregivers to do evil deeds on children’s teeth and gums. Here’s how:
Sippy cups are convenient. But they are only a handy tool to help babies transition from the bottle to a drinking cup. Because of convenience, parents allow kids to keep drinking from sippy cups longer than necessary, often long after they can manage to drink from cups and glasses. And during all this time, this habit encourages the child hang on to his or her drink much longer than if he or she were using a cup, obviously as it can be carried around more easily than a cup.
Prolonged exposure to any drink, be it milk with sugar, or juice and other acidic or sugary drinks can lead to a higher risk of tooth decay. Sippy cups can extend this much more than a regular cup or glass would. In fact, misuse of sippy cups is just another version of another good intentioned parental mistake: letting your baby go to sleep with a milk bottle.
So the advice from the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry is to use sippy cups only as a transitional tool to get babies used to drinking from cups. And then too, ideally, sippy cups should only contain water unless it’s mealtime. If you ask most pediatric dentists, they would also tell you that, mealtimes or not, they would love to see only water in sippy cups, if that were entirely possible in this day and age.
If you don’t believe the evils that sippy cups can do, you can check out the statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) comparing the dental health of Americans in 1988-1994 and 1999-2004. They found that found that cavities in two- to five-year-olds actually increased 15.2 percent, while cavities decreased among older children.
Not that the CDC would come out and say it, but can you guess who the most likely culprits were?
Processing your request, Please wait....
