Dental Advice From Doctor Hammer

Right now, I'm pushing the tip of my tongue up against the roof of my mouth. Just behind my front teeth on the hard ridge. I build up saliva around the edges of my teeth.

The trick here is to keep my tongue in place touching the top of my mouth while swallowing the saliva. You swallow 3,000 times a day and this is where your tongue should be while that's all happening. Some of us, we're tongue thrusters, which means instead of keeping our tongues in place we push our tongues out pressing against the top front teeth. Because of this bad habit I've got a little space between them. Not a David Letterman space, not something that bothers me but who knows what it'll look like 30 years from now.

This knowledge about tongues and their habits, I get it when I go to the dentist with Aiden and Cameron for a cleaning and check-up. Inside a room with green mountains painted on the walls and rainbows bursting in between them, Aiden is laying on his back with Mickey Mouse protective glasses on while their pediatric dentist, Dr. Neal Hammer, counts and checks his teeth.

Dr. Hammer is telling Aiden about how he has to practice keeping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. That his tongue could push push his new grown-up teeth out in directions that would make eating corn on the cob very difficult, if not impossible. Through a clear plastic mask, Dr. Hammer is telling Aiden how to practice. Press the tip of your tongue to the top of your mouth and hold while swallowing. Do this 10 times, one after another for a set. Do 8 sets a day. This will retrain your tongue and your brain.

Me, I butt in and tell Dr. Hammer about how my childhood dentist told me to hold a mint there with my tongue. I tried it once, held the mint up there till it burned and I spit it out. Since that time pressing my tongue against the mint I've been thrusting my tongue out 3,000 times a day, with every swallow.

With his small, slightly grey ponytail, Dr. Hammer tells us about how some kids used to do that with Cheerios and even worse, those little rubberbands from braces. How many rubberbands got swallowed, away we'll never know.

Aiden, in between the fingers inside his mouth, is nodding to do the exercises. If you want a kid to agree to something, just ask him in the middle of his dental exam. They'll agree to anything just to get it all over with and to get their hands on the red bowl of toys, the blue tube of stickers and tattoos. When I go to the dentist any reward I ever get is a bill.

If Dr. Hammer were my dentist, I suspect I wouldn't be a tongue thruster. He's tough in a caring about your teeth kind of way. Because, trust me, the last thing you need in a kid's dentist who is a pushover. Someone who lets you slip by after you give up on the tongue and mint exercise.

With my tongue pressed up tight, I relax and let the built-up saliva gulp down my throat.

Dr. Neal Hammer is a pediatric dentist with offices at 505 Stillwells Corner Road in Freehold Township.