This is a fun one isn’t it! Any parent with a child who has hypersensitivity to taste will appreciate the teeth brushing battlefield.

How much would we love to just say “right, time to brush your teeth, off we go to the bathroom” and they say “ok mumma!” and trot off to stand at the sink. Nope. Doesn’t happen in our house either. It took us a long time to realise that the reason was not defiance, it was the difficulty in transitioning to the onslaught of sensory overload - the minty toothpaste, the feeling of the bristles on her gums - eeuuggghh.

So I took this decision: “If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain." Even now, at 11 years old, we don’t ask H to come to the bathroom. We bring the already loaded toothbrush to her, wherever she is. It has got easier as she’s got older but even now, as we hover the toothbrush gently in front of her face, we have to wait whilst she prepares herself to transition to the sensory onslaught that she so desperately wants to avoid. If we try to get her to open her mouth too soon, she turns her head away, lips clenched tight. She is visibly gulping and swallowing whilst her brain frantically attempts to get ready. Showing impatience or frustration if she’s already “fizzy” after a hard day is also very unproductive. Even now, I still sit there, toothbrush poised in my hand, and inside my head I’m saying “count to 10 Kate, and breathe, if I don’t show my frustration, we will get it done quicker in the end!”.

Over the years though, to help with the transitioning to the sensory input needed to brush teeth (when we had flat refusal!) we found it worked well to bring other senses into play to override the taste and touch hypersensitive senses. We have adapted the techniques as H has grown but when she was around five, we devised a cunning plan to engage her in something that was fun for her (so a dopamine hit if you like) that she would associate as being a positive experience as much as possible. We had a handful of tricks up our sleeves that we would rotate weekly to stop the ADHD boredom kicking in. So things like:

“Oh H, fun game for you! Here is a piece of A4 plain paper and a felt tip pen. Daddy is going to think of an object. But here is the trick, let’s see if you can close your eyes (no cheating!) and then follow daddy’s instructions to see if you can draw the object he’s describing! So daddy might say ‘draw a straight line down the left hand side of the paper, and stop! Now move the pen to the right a bit, and stop’ etc. You have to listen VERY carefully to daddy’s instructions! We are going to set the timer for two minutes. When the time starts, you open your mouth. I am going to brush your teeth at the same time that you are listening to daddy and drawing the picture. When the two minutes is up and the buzzer goes off, open your eyes and see if you can guess what the object is that you have drawn!”. H was so focused on using her ears and hands to complete the game, that the sensory input in her mouth took a temporary back seat.

Now I hear some of you thinking “oh my goodness, that is A LOT of effort to get a small set of teeth brushed.” Yep. Yes it is!!! However, what we realised is that the teeth brushing task could be done in 15 minutes (allowing time to explain the game, giving space for her to prepare her brain for transition and then waiting for her to be ready to begin) rather than the 45 minutes it took, along with insurmountable energy, to get her to just brush them. The procrastinating, the whining, the pleading, the avoiding, the anger, the tears, the meltdown. When you add all of those things up and spend 45 minutes doing that (twice a day), you start to realise that putting a bit of effort in up front can go a long way!!

Now that H is 11, she’s obviously grown out of those types of games. She now brushes her own teeth in the morning (although, in true ADHD style, she can only do it in the last few minutes before leaving the house when the deadline creates the dopamine needed to initiate the task!) but I still brush them at night.

The bedtime teeth brushing is currently looking like this: she gets three minutes of Roblox time in which she has to agree to let me brush whilst she plays. She is allowed to use my phone to play and she doesn’t get handed the phone until I have arrived with the toothbrush and I am ready to go. She gets two minutes to play whilst I brush her teeth and one minute’s grace time to transition to handing my phone back to me. If she doesn’t hand my phone back to me, she loses the privilege of having Roblox the next night. Depending on her regulation levels, this isn’t always successful but if she melts down because she couldn’t hand it back and she loses the privilege the next evening, I now have the confidence to stay there quietly, maintain the boundary, hold space for her ride the storm of the meltdown and then we quietly move on.

She has had to go through this loss of privilege (and we have had to weather the storm of a meltdown) a handful of times because it takes several goes of the same lesson before that lesson is learned, however, holding that boundary now means she knows the rules and she is now generally managing better self control.

Now, some parents may wish to judge on the giving of screen time as a distraction. Judge away if you need to but remember that three minutes is a very limited amount of time. But if that’s not for you, you may wish to try allowing your child to have a favourite song played out on a speaker and making it a game to see if they can brush their teeth until the song finishes. Or a favourite clip on Kids YouTube. A video that incorporate sound, colour and movement that can engage their sound and sight senses, whilst you work on their teeth!

Anyway, if you can get creative and find ways to help them override the negative sensory overload with something else, you may find some relief in this laborious task. Wishing you luck!