Jaw Development Secrets: Nurturing Healthy Smiles

Jaw Development Secrets: Nurturing Healthy Smiles

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If someone were to tell you that there was a way to reduce your child’s risk of needing braces—and maybe even help them keep their wisdom teeth—would you be interested? I’m Dr. Michael Bennett, and today on More Than Teeth, we’re talking about something most parents never really hear about from their healthcare providers.

And that is: why are their kids’ jaws not developing the way they used to? And what can we actually do about it when the jaws are underdeveloped? What that looks like is, “My child needs braces,” or, “My child needs their wisdom teeth out.”

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Historical Perspective on Jaw Development

When you look at ancient skulls, they have very wide arches, straight teeth, and plenty of room for wisdom teeth.

If you fast forward to today and you see what’s out there—crowding, extractions, braces have become almost like a childhood rite of passage. So what’s changed from centuries ago till now? Anthropologists, researchers like Dr. Kini and Dr. Price, and other modern airway specialists and researchers have traced this problem back to a perfect storm of lifestyle and environmental factors such as soft foods, mouth breathing, and a lack of breastfeeding.

“Healthy jaws aren’t a genetic lottery—they’re the outcome of healthy habits and environments.” —Dr. Bennett

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Modern Lifestyle and Environmental Factors

So today I want to walk through three key ideas: what changed in our environment and in our habits; how those changes affect facial growth, airway development, and overall health; and what parents can do right now to help guide natural tooth, jaw, and facial structural development of the head and neck area—and set their kids up for a much healthier and happier life with wider smiles, without relying on braces or extractions to accomplish that.

Make sure you stick around at the end of this podcast, because I’m going to give you a bunch of real, practical ideas that you can do right now that cost very little—or nothing.

So, what changed in our environment and our habits? As researchers studied craniofacial growth, they found that populations with normal development of their jaws and plenty of room for their teeth were populations that ate whole foods. They ate durable foods. They had foods that were low in allergy potential. They didn’t eat ultra-processed foods. They didn’t eat refined flours and sugars—and therefore they had nice wide arches. They also breastfed much longer than we do in modern times. They dealt with mouth breathing.

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Impact of Mouth Breathing and Allergies

The early American Indian mothers, when they saw their little baby breathing through the mouth, would gently pinch those lips together to help the child breathe through the nose. Besides that, toxins in our environment—the pollution in our air and our water—can matter. In the United States, for the most part, we have good, clean resources, but there are pollutants in our food and water—things that can cause our immune system to overreact to our environment and cause congestion, especially in our nose.

When we have congestion in our nose, then our mouth has to open in order to breathe. When our mouth opens, our tongue drops.

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The Role of the Tongue in Jaw Development

The tongue muscle is what applies pressure whenever we swallow to the roof of our mouth and the structures of our face. That roof of the mouth, called the maxilla, is the central bone of the face. It is literally connected to nine other bones. When a child is developing and the tongue is able to go up on the roof of the mouth, then the upper jaw takes the shape of the tongue.

A tongue should be nice and rounded, and generally in the Caucasian population, the width of the upper jaw between the upper first molars should be around 38 to 42 millimeters—measured from the gumline of one tooth to the gumline of the tooth across the arch. For other ethnic groups—African descent, Asian descent, shorter cranial base, non-European—it should be a little bit larger, perhaps 42 to 46 millimeters wide.

So when the tongue is able to be up there, the jaws grow into a normal size, and then we have enough room for teeth to erupt into the mouth, line up naturally, and have room for wisdom teeth. If the jaws aren’t allowed to grow because the tongue isn’t up there—because a person has allergies in their nose and they can’t nose-breathe—then the mouth will shrink. Teeth will push in. They will corkscrew or twist and turn to come into the mouth, and therefore an orthodontic problem results, as well as a surgical problem where wisdom teeth need to come out. The other problem with small jaws is that small jaws are connected to the airway spaces.

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Airway Health and Behavioral Issues

When the jaws are small, the airways are small. The airway is synonymous with life. If we have a good, healthy, open airway, then we will generally have a much healthier, happier existence from a physical standpoint. If our breathing is at issue—if our sleep is poor—then it subjects us to a myriad of chronic problems. In children, the way it manifests often is through behavioral issues and educational or intellectual declines or negative results.

ADHD and ADD are often related. In fact, there is research showing that children with disabilities tend to have a higher rate of sleep-breathing disorders. So, is there a correlation? I believe there is. When the body is trying to develop and grow and all the organ systems are trying to do their function—trying to do what they’re supposed to—cognitive function or the nervous system will be impaired if the sleep architecture is impaired. In other words, if our sleep is fragmented or disrupted because we’re not breathing well, then the normal healing and growth processes are interrupted, and energy has to be spent in survival mode. If they’re not breathing well, they wake up fatigued, they may wet the bed while they sleep, and so forth.

So we want to make sure that the jaw is properly developed—not just so teeth line up properly and to avoid wisdom teeth extraction—but even more importantly, so that our airway is open and functional so we can have great sleep.

In modern dental offices where a dentist like myself is airway-centered, we have imaging equipment such as a cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scanner, and other scanners—acoustic rhinometry and pharyngometry—that allow us to easily identify any anatomical obstructions in the whole upper airway. When I refer to the whole upper airway, I’m referring from the tip of the nose all the way down to the vocal cords.

“Breathe well, sleep deeply, grow fully—airway comes first.” —Dr. Bennett

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Case Study: Treating a Child’s Breathing Disorder

I was thinking the other day about a young five-year-old who came in, whose mother indicated that he had headaches for over three years. He had been diagnosed with excessive intracranial pressure, and they were at their wits’ end, not knowing what to do.

For this little boy, I did my usual workup and identified that he had a sleep-breathing disorder, and he had anatomical obstructions through his nose and throat. He had a high palate. He didn’t have enough room for his tongue. So we created a treatment plan to address all of those obstructions, one of which included expansion of his upper jaw—better put, remodeling of the upper jaw (maxilla) to help open tongue space and open breathing space.

We started that treatment, and in about three weeks, as the child was using the maxillary remodeling/expansion device and using some protocols prescribed by the ear, nose, and throat doctor to open up his nasal breathing, his mother indicated that his headaches had gone away completely. I saw him three months after we started the treatment, and they were still gone.

It was amazing to the other practitioners involved in his treatment that he had such a quick resolution of his symptoms, and his mother obviously was very happy—very emotional and grateful that we were able to help him start breathing and sleeping better, and his health improved. He’s able to function more as a normal boy. I’m excited about the end result of his treatment. It’s powerful when the body can breathe and sleep. If the therapy is directed toward unlocking the healing properties already built into the body that occur during sleep, then there’s a powerful medical model to help us.

There are other important things, such as myofunctional therapy, that we employed with this young man so that he could swallow properly, get his tongue up on the roof of his mouth, and improve the tone of his tongue. We also focused on nasal breathing, as I mentioned, and we commonly use xylitol nasal spray to help moisturize the nose and to help clear minor nasal congestion.

We also encouraged him to chew his food longer—at least 15 chews for each bite—and to eat more carrots and celery and other durable-type foods. He wasn’t to eat the processed foods, ideally. He continued to progress because as we finished the remodeling of this airway—in other words, taking the device out—we are going to need to have that tongue up on the roof of the mouth, and we need to have good, healthy, long-term habits. Those are some practical things that we’ve used in this case.

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Practical Tips for Parents

One thing that families have found helpful is using a fridge organizer. Cut up vegetables, put them in the fridge, and pull them out with each meal. Include carrots, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, sugar snap peas, and even radishes and turnips. Then have them chew each bite 15 times. Take time to have a meal together as a family—20 to 30 minutes—so there’s plenty of time to chew. Ideally, the food should be almost liquefied before you swallow it; it will be digested better.

Try to avoid ultra-processed foods. Swap out applesauce for apple slices; smoothies for salads. Chewing—just remember—chewing is nature’s orthodontic activator, and the tongue is nature’s orthodontist.

Protect the airway for everyone in the house. Make sure your filters are changed out at least every three months in your home—or at the very least, checked. Improve your health by implementing nasal breathing for your family—even when a person is running, try to breathe through the nose. If there’s congestion, address it. You can use a humidifier by the bed or a HEPA-quality air purifier in the room. Just get breathing through the nose.

Remember the family mantra: lips together, teeth apart, tongue on the roof of the mouth. That’s where we need to live when we’re not using our mouth. Teach kids to close their mouth when they’re watching TV, when they’re running, jumping, playing—keep their mouth closed.

During sleep, you can download a free app called SnoreLab for iPhone and SnoreClock for Android, and record one or two nights of your children’s sleep. You might be amazed because you might hear some snoring, gasping, choking, and pauses in breathing. That should be alarming because normal breathing is silent breathing. Just as we’re sitting here talking, you don’t hear any snoring from me—and trust me, I’ve been the “snorer in the family,” and I’ve had to treat myself. So listen for those things.

Also, around 3:00 a.m., set your alarm. Go in and see your child sleeping. Check to see: are their lips apart? Are they restless? Is their head back and tilted—kind of like a jaw-thrust breathing reestablishment technique that an EMT would use? Video record what you see because you may use that at a subsequent appointment with an airway-focused dentist or your primary care physician.

Remember that rhythm matters in terms of circadian rhythm. The body grows and repairs while the sun is down—mostly. So, sleep while the sun is down. The younger the child, the longer the sleep they should have. Teenagers should have eight hours. Adolescents should have ten hours. Infants need 14 to 16 hours. There should be a wind-down period—dim the lights, don’t look at the television prior to bed, and soft breathing through the nose helps the body relax and prepare for sleep. Then, partner with airway-focused dentists, myofunctional therapists, and sleep physicians when—or if—you see some of these signs we’re talking about.

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Conclusion: Ensuring Healthy Jaw Development

I hope that’s been helpful. We’ve covered three main areas. First, we asked the question: if there was a way to reduce your child’s risk of having orthodontic treatment later on in life for crowded teeth—or having extractions of their wisdom teeth because they don’t have enough room—would you want to know?

We covered what causes that. It’s not genetics alone—it is the environment. It’s called epigenetics. So first we have to look at our environment. What foods are being eaten? Are they soft foods? Are they processed foods? Is the child breathing through their mouth? If they are, then they are using the muscles of the face and tongue much less. Those habits or those issues can lead to underdeveloped jaws. That is the reason for the crowding, the narrow arches, and the airway problems. Remember, the mouth sits underneath and in front of the airway. If the mouth is small, the airway is going to be small.

Also remember the simple, practical things we talked about—like having a vegetable tray organized in the fridge to take out before each meal, and doing a low-cost home sleep check with an app.

Hopefully this has been helpful. Share it with a parent or grandparent—anybody who cares about giving their child the healthiest start possible. Remember: strong jaws, open airways, and confident smiles begin long before braces—and, hopefully, your child will enjoy the benefits of not needing braces or extractions. I can’t guarantee anything regarding that, but as we address the underlying causes, the risk goes down.

Alright—take care.

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If you found this episode valuable, share it with a colleague or friend who wants to breathe better, sleep deeper, and live healthier. Your support helps us expand the conversation around airway-focused care and whole-body wellness.

Together, we can move dentistry beyond the chair.

Michael Bennett, DDS, PhD

Board-Certified Dentist | Healthcare Professions Educator

Empowering total health through airway-focused dentistry

Advanced Dental Care – Dr. Bennett’s clinical practice and patient-centered services

Connect on LinkedIn – Join the movement for airway-first, total health dentistry

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