Our treatments are designed to ensure healthy oral and overall development.

Ensure the Best Possible Start for Your Child

Kids Developmental Dentistry

You may think that Parker Family Dentistry is a place you take your children for cleanings and cavities, and you’d be right! However, other factors play a much bigger role in a child's overall health and development than many realize.

A Whole-Child Approach to Care

Our dentists take a whole-child approach to dental care. We monitor:

How teeth are coming in
How the jaw is growing
How the airway functions
How habits or structural issues affect development

Identifying concerns while your child is still growing almost always leads to better outcomes than waiting until later.

Why Developmental Dentistry Matters

Evaluating your child for proper development patterns offers several important benefits.

Healthy Growth from the Start

Early intervention guides jaw, airway, and facial development during the growing years when the body is most responsive to treatment, reducing the need for more invasive correction later.

Address the Root Cause

Many childhood issues, like mouth breathing or speech difficulties, have an underlying cause. Identifying and treating it early can improve outcomes across multiple developmental areas.

The Best Possible Foundation

From the way their teeth come in to the way they breathe at night, the decisions made during childhood can have lifelong consequences. Developmental dentistry helps make sure they are beneficial.

Meet Our Doctors:

Dr. Esi Parker
General Dentist

Dr. Esi is a highly skilled and personable dentist who is from Brooklyn, NY, Dr. Esi Parker completed her undergraduate studies at Fordham University in New York before attending dental school at Midwestern University in ...

Dr. Travis Parker
General Dentist

Dr. Travis Parker is a friendly, and highly skilled dentist who grew up in North Dakota. He achieved his Bachelors in Biology at Dickinson State University in his home state before graduating from dental school ...

Meet More of our Staff

Making Room for Healthy Teeth

When jaw space is limited, teeth may become crowded, overlap, or even erupt in the wrong position. The following treatments are designed to help create and maintain the space a developing smile needs.

Spacers and Expanders — Spacers are small devices that hold open the gap left by a lost baby tooth and preserve room for the permanent tooth coming in behind it. Expanders gently widen the upper jaw, creating more space for incoming teeth and correcting bite alignment.
Kids' Extractions — Sometimes, we recommend removing a baby tooth to allow a permanent tooth to come in properly. Our dentists perform children's extractions gently, using local anesthesia and nitrous oxide when needed for comfort.

Facial Growth and Development Assessment

Our dentists monitor facial development, looking for patterns that can affect tooth eruption and bite alignment. A narrow jaw, uneven growth, or an imbalanced bite are much easier to address while the bones are still forming.

Monitoring dental growth and development

Pacifier Use and Thumb Sucking Therapy

These are normal, comforting habits for infants and young toddlers, but they can begin to affect jaw and oral development when they continue beyond age three or four. Common effects include an open bite, a narrowed palate, and changes in the position of front teeth.

After assessing how these habits affect development, our dentists can offer strategies for moving on from them, without making the child feel ashamed or pressured.

Myofunctional Therapy

Myofunctional therapy is like physical therapy for the muscles of the mouth, tongue, lips, and face. When these muscles don’t work properly, it can affect breathing, swallowing, speech, and even the development of the teeth and jaws.

The goal of myofunctional therapy is to gently retrain those muscles to address habits such as mouth breathing or tongue thrusting. This is a noninvasive approach that typically involves simple exercises performed consistently over time.

Schedule a Developmental Dentistry Consultation

If you have questions about your child's development, a habit that concerns you, or something your child's teacher or pediatrician has flagged, we are happy to take a look and share what we see. Early answers are almost always better than waiting.

Call our Logansport, IN, dental office at (574) 753-454 to schedule an appointment with Dr. Travis Parker or Dr. Esi Parker.

Book Your Child's Developmental Evaluation

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