The advent calendars opened on Monday. By Friday, some children will have had chocolate before they’ve had breakfast, and between now and New Year there will be selection boxes, party bags, Grandma’s toffees and at least one visit from a well-meaning man handing out candy canes. If you work with under-fives, December is the month their teeth need you most.
Promoting good oral health stopped being optional a while ago. The EYFS requires providers to promote children’s good oral health, and inspectors are entitled to ask how you do it. Where plenty of settings get stuck is what “promoting” actually looks like on a wet Tuesday.
Supervised toothbrushing settles down faster than you’d think
We’ll be honest: the first week of a supervised toothbrushing scheme is chaos. Somebody eats the toothpaste, somebody brushes the table, and two children swap brushes the moment your back is turned. Then, somewhere in week two, it becomes a routine, and by week three the children are queueing for it like it’s an activity. To them, it is one.
A workable scheme needs surprisingly little: hygienic storage that keeps brushes separate, a regular slot in the day (after lunch suits most settings), and staff who understand the technique they’re modelling. The training is the piece people skip, and it’s the piece that separates a scheme that protects teeth from one that just wets them.
The drinks do more damage than the sweets
Here’s the part that surprises parents: it’s very often the drinks. Juice with every meal, squash on tap at home, a bottle of milk at bedtime after brushing. Teeth cope far better with sugar that arrives at mealtimes than with sugar sipped and grazed across the whole day. In the setting, the kindest things you can put on the lunch trolley are milk and water, and the kindest habit you can model is water as the default answer to thirst.
You can’t control what happens at home, and December makes home a losing battle anyway. What you can control is your own menu, your own trolley, and the messages children absorb from the adults around them six hours a day.
Menus help more than most people realise. Sugar that arrives with a meal does far less harm than sugar grazed between meals, so pudding served alongside lunch beats biscuits appearing at random points in the afternoon. Even dried fruit, for all its wholesome reputation, behaves like a sweet as far as teeth are concerned, and belongs at the table rather than in an all-day snack pot.
Families need signposting, not sermons
A parent lingers at the door at pickup and mentions, half laughing, that their two-year-old screams the house down at the sight of a toothbrush. That moment is oral health promotion, if the practitioner knows what to say. Sometimes the answer is a practical tip. Sometimes it’s pointing the family towards NHS dental services, since children’s dental care is free and plenty of parents don’t realise it. Sometimes it’s a quiet word with the health visitor. Children with additional needs may need adapted approaches and rather more patience again, and supporting them to access oral care is part of the same duty.
Nobody needs a lecture at the door. They need the right pointer at the right moment, from someone they already trust with their child.
Our Oral Health Promotion in Early Years course covers the whole picture: the EYFS duty and why it exists, setting up and running a supervised toothbrushing scheme, the food and drink choices that protect teeth, partnership with parents and health visitors, and supporting children with additional needs to access oral care.
Meet the EYFS oral health duty with confidence
One short online course covers toothbrushing schemes, diet, family partnership and signposting, and earns each learner an NFAQ-accredited certificate.
The sugar tide rolls in every December, and no nursery is going to hold it back single-handed. The settings that make the biggest difference aren’t the ones that ban the advent calendar. They’re the ones where teeth get brushed after lunch, water gets poured without comment, and parents pick up a little friendly expertise at the door along with the wet paintings.