Bluegrass Device (for tongue thrust) for 8 year old?
Hello BPN Community,
We've embarked in the wild world of orthodontia for our 8 year old. After 3 pretty similar opinions, we opted for a palate expander with a bluegrass device to prevent tongue thrust and then braces to come once the space is opened for the teeth. When we went in today to get the devices put in, to our surprise they only installed the bluegrass device, essentially a toy for the tongue to play with to retrain its movement and position in the mouth. We were told that just retraining the tongue may be sufficient to allow the mouth to widen and therefore eliminate the need for the physical manipulation of the expander. As people who were hoping for the least intervention possible this sounds great, but we are wondering how likely is retraining the tongue alone going to do the job (not to mention our many questions about why this option didn't come up earlier!).
Does anyone have any experience with using a bluegrass device? Should we believe the orthodontist that once our child's tongue starts resting at the top of her mouth the palate will expand naturally? We're feeling confused because they originally made us feel like we had to act fast before our kid had a growth spurt, and now the plan is to have the bluegrass in for 6 months to see if anything changes.
Thanks for any helpful thoughts, rants on orthodontists, cautionary tales, and happy endings :)
Parent Replies
Here has been our experience with ortho after 6-7 long years of ortho (and still not done). In a nutshell: they make everything sound urgent in the moment to try to maximize how much money they can make off you. I wish we actually hadn't started as young as we did as it made no difference and just cost us double. We started when our daughter was 8-9 as the ortho told us if we did braces at that age to expand the jaw while the bones were still moveable, we wouldn't need any teeth pulled. This first phase cost us $7000.
As it turned out, she ended up needing 2 teeth pulled years later. Then they acted so slowly once she got her braces off to get her a retainer, all the teeth moved out of place, which they assured me was normal. And then suddenly she needed braces again (second round) which was another $7500.
At some point she also got this same device you are talking about to stop her tongue pressing on her teeth. That wasn't too invasive.
We are now nearing the end of her ortho treatment but we are still dealing with a jaw that hasn't moved much, even though we started very young. Basically my advice is not to start braces on baby teeth. It made zero difference with anything even though they promised us it would make the later treatments easier.