It’s almost trick-or-treating season, and our pediatric team wants to help your child’s smile stay safe during this frightfully festive time. Between scary school activities, decorating your home, and visiting petrifying pumpkin patches for cider and donuts, we want your little witch or goblin to safeguard their devilishly delightful fangs from the trickery of tooth decay and cavities!
While the safest route to healthy teeth means avoiding sugary sweets, we also don’t want your child to stage a revolt, so we have some ideas to help them maintain a healthy smile all month long while making the most of their trick-or-treat bag on their Halloween night.
Trick or Treat Don’ts
Dried fruit like raisins and cranberries may seem like they’re healthy alternatives to candy, but they tend to cling to tooth crevices, dental fillings, braces, and retainers and are harder to clean. Sour candies contain tooth-damaging acids that prematurely wear down precious tooth enamel. Hard and chewy candy invites harmful oral bacteria to attack teeth at length, getting trapped between teeth and lingering longer. Some examples are:
- Caramels
- Taffy
- Hard or chewy candy
- Jellybeans
- Licorice
- Bubblegum
- Popcorn
- Nuts
Trick or Treat Do’s
- Candy bars are quick to eat and don’t stick around on tooth surfaces.
- Powder candy, like bottlecaps and smarties, dissolves fairly fast so they also don’t stay on teeth for too long.
- Sugar-free candy and sugar-free gum help boost saliva production that neutralizes bad bacteria in the mouth.
Some safer Halloween options include:
- Chocolate without caramel or nuts
- Marshmallows
- Peanut butter cups
- Soft cookies
Safe Halloween Options
- Modeling clay: These are a great way to stimulate your child’s imagination and creativity when the candy fest is over.
- Glowsticks: These come in various sizes and colors to enhance your child’s trick-or-treating experience while making them easy to spot, boosting their safety.
- Ghoulish Halloween goodies: Tuck in some vampire teeth and scary spider rings to play with instead of just gobbling goodies.
- Trixy temporary tattoos: There are plenty of ghostly, witchy or skeleton tattoo options to distract your little trickster!
- Creepy coloring books: There are tons of Halloween-themed coloring books that can take the place of sugary overconsumption. Your child might love soothing their stress, boosting hand-eye coordination, and expressing their creative side with the magic of crayons and colored pencils at home.
- Festive school supplies: Make their time in the classroom more fun with Halloween-themed pencils, pens, erasers and stickers!
- Dress up a water bottle: The best liquid for your child’s smile is water! Water promotes healthy saliva levels, improves cognitive function and helps the body stay hydrated. It also helps your child fight cavities as it clears away leftover sugars, acids, and starches from their pearly whites. You can even dress up the bottle with fanciful Halloween decor and stickers.
Happy Halloween!
We hope these hauntingly happy Halloween tips will bring a smile to your child’s face while making you feel better about their oral health during this month’s festivities. We wish you and yours a fang-tastic night and welcome you to schedule a dental visit for your child and stop in for a spell!