Nobody sends home a dental list with the school supply list. Folders, calculator, cleats, the specific brand of tissues — all of it arrives in an email in early August. Teeth are assumed to be fine.
They usually are. But a handful of things are genuinely easier to handle in the next two weeks than at any other point in the year, and most take a single appointment. Here’s the short version, aimed at the patients we see — teenagers age 14 and up, and their parents.
The easy appointments vanish on the first day of school
Least clinical item on the list, and the one that causes the most frustration, so it goes first. Right now we can see you at ten in the morning on a Tuesday. In three weeks, every family in Coral Springs needs the same two windows — after three o’clock, or Saturday — and those fill further out than people expect.
If a checkup is due this fall, moving it into August is the highest-value thing on this page. Nothing about the care changes. You simply get to pick the time.
Fall sports start before the school year does
Football, soccer and basketball tryouts are already running, which means the mouthguard question is live whether or not anyone has raised it.
The honest version of the evidence: the ADA cites a 2019 systematic review in which athletes going without a mouthguard had more than twice the risk of orofacial injury, and among college basketball players, those in custom-fitted guards saw dental injury rates roughly five times lower than non-users. You will find far more dramatic numbers repeated online. We would rather give you the ones that hold up.
On custom versus boil-and-bite: a properly fitted drugstore guard is much better than no guard, and the ADA’s own framing is that the best mouthguard is the one that actually gets worn. That is usually what settles it. A custom guard is thinner, easier to talk through, and less likely to trigger a gag reflex, so it tends to end up in the mouth rather than the bottom of a gym bag. And a guard made two seasons ago has probably stopped fitting — mouths change quickly at this age.
The teenage years are a high-risk stretch, and it is not about laziness
Fifteen-year-olds get more cavities than eleven-year-olds, and it is rarely because they stopped brushing. It is schedule. Practice runs late, a sports drink gets nursed across two hours, a snack happens between every class, and dinner slides to nine. What drives decay is not the total sugar so much as the number of separate times the mouth is exposed — a mouth that gets something every ninety minutes never gets the recovery window it needs. That is the part most people find genuinely surprising.
Braces or aligners raise the difficulty again, since there is simply more surface to clean around. None of this calls for a lecture. It calls for a look, before the school year makes everything harder to spot.
If there is a senior heading off to college
This one has a hard deadline, and it is the item we most often see people wish they had handled. Get them seen before move-in.
The reason is practical rather than clinical. Anything borderline — a cracked filling, a tooth that has been sensitive since June, a wisdom tooth starting to make itself known — is far simpler to deal with while they are still in town, still on your plan, and still have a free afternoon. The same problem at eight hundred miles’ distance in November becomes an unfamiliar office, an unplanned bill, and a missed week of class.
It is also worth agreeing in advance on what happens if something goes wrong out of state. Knowing who to call at eleven at night is worth more than most people credit.
If braces or aligners have been on your mind
Starting in August rather than October moves the adjustment period — the sore first week, the learning curve with trays or a retainer — out of the way before the term is fully underway. The early visits also land while schedules are still flexible. If you have been considering it, this is a sensible month for the first conversation, even if you decide to wait.
One for the parents
While you are booking everyone else: if you have been waking with a sore jaw, a dull headache at the temples, or teeth that look shorter than they used to, that is worth mentioning at the same visit. Grinding and clenching tend to track with a busy season, and the start of the school year is reliably one. A custom night guard is a small thing that prevents a genuinely expensive one — worn-down teeth do not grow back.
Your benefits are on a clock
Most dental plans run on a calendar year, and whatever is unused on December 31st does not carry over. From August that leaves about four months — and the last of them are the busiest weeks we see all year, when everyone remembers at once.
If you have an FSA, the deadline is often tighter still. Five minutes now beats the discovery in the third week of December. We are glad to check it with you.
The five-minute version
- Book the checkup now, while daytime slots still exist.
- Sort the mouthguard before the first game, and check that last season’s still fits.
- Get the college-bound senior seen before move-in, and agree on an emergency plan.
- Mention anything that changed over the summer — a sensitive tooth, a chip, bleeding gums, a sore jaw.
- Check what is left on your benefits before the December rush.
None of this is urgent in the sense that something is wrong. That is precisely why it is worth doing now — August is the last month this year when none of it is. And if something has already been bothering you, tell us sooner rather than later and we will give you a straight answer about whether it is something or nothing.