Dear KidsOutAndAbout readers:
February is Children’s Dental Health Month, which means it's the perfect time to talk about LYING.
The first lie my daughter Madison ever attempted was when she was about 3. "Did you brush your teeth?” I asked as she was getting ready for bed. She nodded earnestly, but I had my doubts; a check of the toothbrush revealed
it was dry as the Sahara. "Looks like we need a do-over," I said. "Try again."
In a 2025 Delta Dental study of 1000 parents of kids age 12 and under, 67% of respondents reported difficulty in getting their kids to brush their teeth. And in a related
but thoroughly unscientific survey, 100% of the friends I asked told me that their own kids have lied about tooth brushing at least once.
See, young children don’t experience truth as adults do; their developing minds blur the line between reality and hope, between what happened and what they would prefer had happened. Brushing is tedious, being done is better. Add a desire to please Mom, and those wires can cross. In those early years, our job is to help kids gradually
separate fact from wishful thinking. You might think that prosecuting dishonesty harshly might scare kids into telling the truth, but that often just scares them into hiding more cleverly.
Our goal as parents isn't just to have kids who brush their teeth and do their own homework and someday file tax returns without creative interpretations of “business mileage,” although we do want all those things. But overall, we want kids who are brave enough to be, rather
than seem to be. If they see early that mistakes can be brought into the light and fixed with a do-over, they’re far less likely to build a life around pretending they didn't happen.
So my best recommendation for Children's Dental Health Month is to model both scrupulous honesty and scrupulous teeth-brushing yourself. In case you need an immediate solution, though, I hunted down a list of kids' best tooth-brushing songs thoughtfully supplied by the American Dental Association. Grit your teeth and hum along.
—Debra Ross, publisher of KidsOutAndAbout.com, co-author of The Eclipse Effect: How
to Seize Extraordinary Moments to Build Strong Communities
