Parental acceptance of different dental behaviour management techniques and its relation to dental fear, attitudes and family-related factors

Abstract

Background: Dental fear and anxiety might lead to avoidance of dental care and behaviour management problems. Various behaviour management techniques (BMTs) are used to reduce children’s fear and anxiety (DFA), encourage positive behav-iour and provide high- quality dental care. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between parental dental anxiety and the acceptance of behavior management techniques.Methods: A total of 121 children 2- 6 years old and their parents were recruited from the University affiliated den-tal clinic in Hong Kong. Online self- completed structured questionnaire was used to collect information. The question-naire includes five parts: Parenting Style and Dimension Questionnaire (PSDQ), Corah Dental Anxiety Scale (CDAS), Children Fear Survey Schedule- Dental Subscale (CFSS– DS), parental acceptance to different BMTs used in paediatric dentistry, and sociodemographic information. Parents rated their preferences to after watching a video dem-onstration on the BMTs. Chi- square tests and Fisher`s Exact Test were used for statistical analysis. The significance level was set at P0.05.Results: Over half (57%) of the parents had low dental anxi-ety level, while 80.2% of children had DFA. Most common parenting style of the parents was training style (52.9%), fol-lowed by authoritative (27.3%), authoritarian (16.5%) and permissive (3.3%). Parents preferred non- invasive BMTs. Positive reinforcement (100.0%) and distraction (98.3%) were the most accepted BMTs. General anesthesia was the least preferred. The parenting styles were associated with the levels of preferences for audiovisual distraction (p = 0.036).Conclusions: Parents preferred non- invasive BMTs such as positive reinforcement and distraction for their children. Parenting style should be considered when choosing BMTs.