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Home › Articles › Dental Health › Teething Truths and Tips

Teething Truths and Tips

Why Little Teeth Don't Have to Mean Big Trouble

By Mark Stackpole

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Ever been swimming with a great white shark? Armed yourself with a wooden stake as you hunted vampires? Faced down a hungry bear, pack of wild dogs, rabid rabbit or angry beaver? If so, then you might feel as if you have faced the most fearsomely fanged creatures ever produced by fact or fiction.

You'd be wrong.

Meet Stella Burkhardt, teething toddler.

"Watch out for when those teeth come in," says Katie Burkhardt, Stella's mom, from Seattle, Wash. "Nobody ever told me. There's a book about everything related to parenthood, and yet there's not a book about when teeth come. To me, that was when our kids were most uncomfortable because you don't know and they don't know and can't tell you."

It took Burkhardt and her husband some time to recognize the signs and symptoms of impending teething, a syndrome she came to call "Teething Personality."

"At first, we were thinking it was 'terrible two's,'" Burkhardt says. "She wanted to be held, she was crying a lot and was very assertive. For a while, we lost our sweet, fun little girl to someone we didn't even enjoy being around. Since they have broken through, she is coming back to being herself again. It helped me to put myself in her shoes: 'I'm a little thing with a sharp tooth coming through my gums and it is causing all sorts of pain.' You can have a bad day, but does it happen every day for weeks? Her 'bad days' lasted for about two weeks until her teeth came in."

This round has been easier because Stella can now communicate a little bit about what is going on, and why she might be having that string of bad days. "The first time through, we saw the drooling and her wanting to chew, but now she is telling us: 'My mouth hurts,'" Burkhardt says. "It doesn't help that our kids have big teeth. We'd kind of laugh and make fun that it was a birthing process when their teeth come in."


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