Should It Hurt When Adult Teeth Come In?

Most parents will remember when their children were teething the first time around. It may have made your little one tear up and go through some fussy periods as their baby teeth moved in, and it's understandable if you're worried about going through this again with their adult teeth. Here's the deal about pain from teeth coming in.

What's Normal

Some pain is normal when adult teeth come in — it's a basic fact of life. Unless the adult tooth was directly behind the baby tooth and ready to come in straight away, the gums are likely to heal up and close after the baby teeth fall out. This means that the gums will be in the way when the adult teeth try to move in, and there's nothing to be done here except to break open the gums so that the teeth can grow in.

As a result, you can expect your child to go through some discomfort and potentially even a little gum bleeding during this time. However, this pain shouldn't last more than a couple days for each tooth at most.

What Isn't

If your child continues to be in pain, and especially if you don't see any significant progress of the tooth actually coming in, then you may have a problem on your hands. Teeth shouldn't take long to move in once they actually start inflicting pain, so if your child is still hurting and the tooth hasn't come in yet, it may mean that something is preventing it from moving in. This is called a tooth impaction and it's more common than you might think.

Getting Help

If your child is experiencing a lot of pain from the start or you think their discomfort has been going on too long, there's only one thing to do: get to a dentist. Your child's dentist will be able to examine the gum and tooth with a combination of a physical exam and X-rays to look at the teeth under the surface. If it looks like everything's going along well, your dentist will provide you with some numbing products to help take the edge off the discomfort until the tooth is finished growing in. However, if there is something wrong, they'll perform a procedure to make sure that the tooth comes in correctly. Depending on the problem, this may involve creating a small incision in the gums so the tooth can come in, or something more advanced if the tooth is impacted and can't move in properly.

Speak to a pediatric dentist, like those at Scott W. Murphy Dentistry, for more information.