Toddler Dental Care: Building a Brushing Routine That Sticks

The NHS recommends starting toothbrushing as soon as your baby's first tooth appears, usually around 6 months, and brushing twice a day, every day, from that point on — including the day the routine is hardest to keep up. Building the habit early, before a toddler has strong opinions about it, is genuinely easier than introducing it later.

How much toothpaste, and what strength

• Children under 3: a smear of toothpaste containing at least 1,000ppm fluoride.
• Children aged 3-6: a pea-sized amount of toothpaste containing 1,350-1,500ppm fluoride.
• Check the ppm (parts per million) figure on the tube itself — it's usually printed on the back, and "children's" toothpaste isn't always the right fluoride strength by default.

Encourage your toddler to spit out rather than rinse with water afterwards, since rinsing washes away the fluoride that's meant to keep protecting the teeth after brushing.

Getting a resistant toddler to cooperate

• Let them hold their own brush while you do a second, more thorough pass — independence matters a lot at this age, and a "helper" brush keeps them engaged rather than purely passive.
• Brush together so they can copy you, and see it as a normal shared routine rather than something done to them.
• Try a 2-minute song or timer to make the duration concrete and give a clear, predictable end point.
• Stay consistent even through a bad night — skipping when it's a fight tends to reinforce that resistance eventually works.
• Brush before they're overtired, since evening resistance is often more about tiredness than the brushing itself.

First dentist visit

The NHS recommends taking your child to the dentist as soon as their teeth start coming through, and then every 6 months (or as advised) after that — dental check-ups are free for children in the UK. Early, low-stakes visits help a toddler get comfortable with the environment before any actual treatment is ever needed.

What to limit

Sugary food and drinks, including fruit juice and squash, are the main driver of early tooth decay. Water and plain milk are the only drinks the NHS recommends between meals, and keeping sugary foods to mealtimes only (rather than grazing throughout the day) meaningfully reduces the time teeth spend under acid attack.