There's an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that fear is essentially heritable: your children are looking to you to figure out what to be scared of, and they'll often follow your cues. If you suffer from odontophobia, you have something in common with 16.1% of the Australian population--and you're likely to hope that your children don't join that group themselves. If you take mindful steps to prevent passing on your fears, you can help ensure that your children don't struggle with trips to the dental clinic in the way that you do.

Begin With Active Education

For children who have never been to the dentist before, what happens inside the clinic is likely to be a mystery--and if they're sensing that their parent or caregiver is nervous about it, there's a good chance they'll build that mystery up in their minds to something they're terrified of. The best way to combat this is to demystify the experience as much as possible, well in advance of your appointment. There are plenty of good ways you can do this: 

• Take a trip to your local library and look for a few books designed to explain the dentist to young children. There are plenty of them to choose from and some feature popular characters your child might already be invested in.
• Use bedtime teeth-cleaning as an opportunity to talk about why dental hygiene is important, and move from there into explaining that cleaning your teeth isn't the only thing you need to do to have a healthy mouth.
• Let them ask all the questions they might have, and explain to them in as much detail as they want what the visit will be like.

Take Steps To Conquer Your Own Fear

Your children need to understand that it's good to not be scared of the dental clinic, and nothing will show them that more clearly than watching you work to conquer your own fears of it. Explain to them that you've always struggled with being afraid of the dentist, but that it is actually unnecessary--much in the way that people are afraid of mice even though they're harmless. Let them see you taking active steps to overcome your fear, and ask them for their help in doing that. Nothing will make a child feel surer and stronger more quickly than a parent telling them how brave they are and asking to borrow some courage.