European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Dental treatment, altogether with its characteristics, represents quite stressful act that have influence on all of its participants especially the children. Children often show their distress with the dental situation in an aversive behavior which sometimes leads to management problems. Different pathways for the development of fear have been described. Most of the researches focus on the effect of parental presence and behavior during dental procedures. But however no in depth researches have been done on the influence of parenting style on the child’s behaviour in the dental setting. Thus the purpose of the review is to analyse whether the parenting style really does influence the child behaviour or not.

Background: Children face a moderate to a high degree of stress attached to all kinds of dental treatment resulting in compromised dental treatment. The way children cope with stress has been the focus of psychological and behavioral management research.
Aim: To find a relationship between anxious children to different coping styles that could help the pediatric dentist for planning treatment for the child to aid in effective coping.
Design: The anxiety level of 100 children aged between 8 to 12 years was assessed using a modified child dental anxiety scale (faces). They were then asked to fill up a monitoring-blunting dental tool in which certain dental situations along with their appropriate options were given. Children were asked to answer yes or no to those options. Scores were calculated individually for monitoring and blunting. The highest score was taken as the coping style of that particular child.
Results: A Chi-square test was performed to examine the relationship between the anxiety level and coping strategy and it was found to be non-significant. However, it was seen that children with moderate to high anxiety preferred monitoring coping style than blunting.
Conclusion: Monitoring-Blunting coping style is effective in reducing a child’s dental anxiety.

Purpose: The objective of the present study was to evaluate the association between personality traits, dental anxiety and socioeconomic profile with the dental myths among adults in Chennai City, India.
Methods: A pilot study was conducted among 90 adults aged 18 years and above by multistage random sampling methodology across the socioeconomic groups. The final sample size was found to be 162. A validated and a reliable, bilingual, self-administered questionnaire consisting of four sections namely 1. The demographic details, 2. Personality traits, 3. Modified Dental Anxiety and 4. A 26-item dental myth questionnaire. The collected data was analysed using SPSS version 20.0 and Chi -square test, One way ANOVA and correlations were done and a p-value
Results: Dental myth scores was found to be more in the middle social class, followed by the lower and higher social class and this difference was not statistically significant (p=0.21). The personality traits and dental anxiety were found to be weakly correlated with dental myth scores.
Conclusion: The startling results of the study have shown no relationship between socioeconomic status, dental anxiety, personality traits with the occurrence of dental myths.