You are never too old for braces. The Canadian Association of Orthodontists recommends that your child get an initial orthodontic consult when they are 7-8 years old. Around this age, while some baby teeth are still present, subtle problems with jaw growth and erupting teeth can be identified. This is important because some orthodontic problems are easier to correct if they are found before all the permanent teeth erupt. Even so, most orthodontic patients begin active treatment only between ages 10 and 14.
The more recent philosophy at Bristol Dental Clinic is to continue monitoring the child’s growth to find the right time to start the orthodontic treatment with a view to ensuring that the treatment time is the shortest. At Bristol Dental Clinic, we are of the opinion that starting an orthodontic treatment too early does not really benefit because the end time for the treatment would rarely change as the treatment would only complete when the child has crossed a significant portion of his or her growth curve. However, depending upon the case, an early orthodontic intervention could be warranted.
If you recognize any of the following signs in your child or yourself, it would be worth the effort to schedule a consultation with the orthodontist. These signs are early or late loss of baby teeth, speech difficulty, lisp, inability to biting pizza with your front teeth, difficulty chewing food, sucking thumbs, breathing through mouth, protruded, crowded, or misplaced teeth, grinding and clenching of teeth, jaws that shift, make sounds, protrude or are sunken, biting the cheek or biting into the roof of the mouth, inability to comfortably close lips, malocclusions, poor bite (teeth that meet in an abnormal way or don’t meet at all), facial imbalance or asymmetry or features out of proportion to the rest of the face, etc.