“Daddy, I don’t want you correcting me!”

That’s exactly what my child said after pointing out mistakes during a musical instrument practice. I’m sure at some point in life we’ve been through this before. It’s not pleasant, but necessary. For some, that statement may be mean. Correcting others is something we don’t like to do. It could be traumatizing. Today we’re so concerned about trauma since it could impact a child’s mental health. But there’s a fine balance between correction and going too far with it. You don’t want to push your child too far with correction but you also need to do it when it’s necessary. The question I ask is “do you want to know the truth about your playing an instrument or do you want to be lied to for the sake of not hurting your feelings or ego?”

Correction becomes difficult in dentistry. Throughout your whole life you’ve been told that your dental condition has been good, even if your gums are bleeding and even when you might be getting cavities. How can we intervene with a necessary correction??? For a lot of us, it’s easy to give up because we don’t want to lose the patient to another dentist or have them write a bad online review. We allow this belief to linger.

And so we wait….we wait until the only way possible for anyone to know that something is wrong which is to suffer with prolonged pain and tooth loss. By then, the financial loss of having to restore to health and to have some normality is costly. This brings another pain to deal with.   

But it doesn’t have to be like this….and this is where the admission of something gone wrong comes in. Just as a child who does not like to be corrected, we initially don’t like it. Even if we don’t like it, the admitting part opens doors and opportunities for us to get better. We improve by seeking treatment first and then our dental hygiene. We outline this in our four-step method.

So how did I get my child to realize the importance of correction? We set the musical instrument down. Then I made her watch old clips of the #1 rated TV show in America 20 years ago “American Idol.” The clips showed all the bad singers that auditioned for the show. We laughed at them. A good majority of the singers were told by family members and friends of how “great and awesome” their singing was. The judges told them otherwise.