Help Your Family Keep Smiling
Families are an enormous part of our practice and our business there. We have things set up so we can certainly take care of families. We have three hygienists, so that often if you have a family with several kids, they can all be seeing a different hygienist at the same time, and you don’t have to sit there for three hours while they see the same one person. That’s the advantage of our practice being a little bit larger than some single-dentist practices, but yet we’re small enough that we know the families. I love kids. I moved here to be close to my grandchildren, that’s why I moved to Minnesota. I love taking care of kids, and they’re fun to take care of. When we have to do some dental work on kids, we make a game out of it and they’re great, they love it. We make it so happy for them they don’t realize it was supposed to be hard. It’s only those of us who grew up a couple of decades ago that think it’s supposed to be hard for kids. It’s very important with kids to do what we call “tell, show, do.” I tell them what I’m going to do, and then I show them what’s going to happen, and then I do it. But I’m not going to tell them in words that other adults do that are scary. I have different words I use and talk about, and they’re not scary words and none of it’s hard. Then I might shake their hand and say, “See? We’re going to shake this,” and then we’ll do something that does a little bit of rattling, and they’re like, “Oh, this is no big deal. This is exactly what he said.” And that’s a big thing with kids. You can’t lie to kids more than once, because they’ll never trust you again, so you gotta explain it in terms that they understand and terms that make sense to them, and then it’s not a big deal. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I know this. He said that before.” We take great care of kids. No problems. Some of them we’ll use the gas or the (inaudible), which helps them relax a little bit, but more than that, it blocks their view so they don’t see my hands so it’s not as scary, and I tell them what I’m doing. I mean, it’s not like I could sneak in there and do something and then they never trust me again. That’s not right. So, no, we take real good care of kids. They’re fun.
