Teething Chatter

By Laura Yates on Oct 31, 08 10:52 PM

Nattering about gnashers is an unusual treat for me; I seldom get to attend playgroups, so talking to other moms about all things baby is not something I often get to indulge in. A gaggle of mothers at last night's mini-Halloween party provided me with a great forum to talk about everything from eating to sleeping.

I'd previously thought that the age a baby gets teeth is purely pot luck - some babies get them at two months, some well after a twelve months. There is apparently, an idea behind why teeth sprout when they do. One mom told me about the theory that it is all to do with 'skeletal size.' When the skeleton reaches a proportion of what it will be in adulthood (just over a third we think) , then they get teeth.

Basically, the age at when a baby gets teeth depends on two things.
1) Their eventual adult height. The taller the baby is going to be, the larger he/she will be before he or she gets teeth
2) The rate at which they grow. A baby who grows fast will reach that certain proportion more quickly, thus get teeth earlier.

The more I think of it, the more this theory kind of makes sense. Of all the late teethers I know, everyone of them has at least one parent who is above 6 foot. All the babies with average sized parents, get teeth at a more average age, maybe five or six months.

All this is either an astute, scientific hypothesis, or complete parental guesswork.

To my mind, if this theory is correct then surely Chuck Norris was without teeth till he was fifteen years old, and Ronnie Corbett was the baby who was actually born with teeth. (The urban myth baby that every mother has heard of, but no one actually knows.)

I wonder if the flip side can be applied - can you determine how tall a child will be by when they start teething? Will a child who gets choppers early not advance much on 5 foot? And will those little ones who smile a gummy smile for their first birthday spend their adult life ducking through doorways?

It's all very interesting - or not, if your concerns fall a bit wide of what is coming out of some child's gums, and I suspect that although it might give a brief explanation as to why some babies grow teeth when they do, it is mainly just guesswork.

Like anything else that concerns child development, when we ask why some of them are walking and talking like child prodigies, while others seem to take years to get to the same stage, the answer is, no one knows. As long as they get there eventually, that's all that matters in the end.