Why do children grind their teeth at night?

Children's nocturnal teeth grinding is a typical childhood oral disease. When children sleep at night, they will unconsciously rub their upper and lower teeth repeatedly. This disease is often caused by abnormal excitement of the cells in the human central nervous system, which eventually causes dysfunction of the child's trigeminal nerve, leading to irregular contraction of the area innervated by the trigeminal nerve, causing the child to make a creaking teeth grinding sound when he sleeps at night.

There are many reasons for grinding your teeth at night, such as emotional tension. Fear, anger, hostility, resistance and other tense emotions, if for various reasons it is difficult for the patient to vent them in time, these emotions will be expressed periodically in various ways in the subconscious mind, and teeth grinding is one of the manifestations.

In addition, local factors can also cause children to grind their teeth at night. It is speculated that if there is early occlusal contact, the patient often tries to grind down the high points of the tooth surface. If this phenomenon occurs frequently, bruxism will develop over time.

There are also some systemic factors that cause children to grind their teeth at night. Gastrointestinal dysfunction related to parasites, childhood nutritional deficiencies, allergies or endocrine disorders may be the causes of bruxism.

Bruxism can be seen in people who have the habit of chewing gum, tobacco, toothpicks, etc., and they are also prone to grinding their teeth while sleeping at night.

People are in the period of replacing teeth between the ages of 6 and 13, and they will grind their teeth to adapt to the grinding of the upper and lower teeth. However, if teenagers and adults who have passed the tooth replacement period often grind their teeth, it is a pathological condition.

For children who grind their teeth at night, we must actively find out the reasons, especially the psychological and local reasons. Once the reasons are found, we should actively avoid the factors that cause teeth grinding, so that the teeth grinding phenomenon can be eliminated. If children grind their teeth, parents should not blame them too much before they go to bed to avoid grinding their teeth due to nervousness.