Sep 7, 2026 · 30 min · 10 segments
If toothbrushing feels like a daily battle in your house, you’re not alone. In this episode of *Not Just Theories*, I take a very real, very common parenting challenge (toothbrushing resistance) and…
So to start with the obvious thing, in our house, toothbrushing is one of the parenting tasks where we've decided there's not an option to say, we will skip it tonight because you don't want to do it.
There are plenty of things in parenting where I'm very happy to say, let's try again tomorrow, or we don't actually need to do that.
You know, the whole pick your battles.
Toothbrushing is one of the battles in our house that we've chosen to make a hill to die on.
And this can be quite challenging if your child is finding toothbrushing genuinely difficult because you want to respect their autonomy and you want to listen when they communicate that something's unpleasant and you want to acknowledge their feelings and avoid unnecessary power struggles.
But at the same time, their teeth need brushing.
It is a long-term health concern, oral health.
So for us, the goal wasn't necessarily to find a strategy that made our children want to brush their teeth because children aren't always going to want to do it.
The goal was always to find ways to make a non-negotiable task more achievable.
So we need to make a distinction there between the boundary and the strategy.
So the boundary was relatively consistent.
We brush our teeth in the morning and in the evening.
But the strategy, how we brush our teeth, was super flexible and it could change completely depending on what we needed to do on the day.
So to start with the obvious thing, in our house, toothbrushing is one of the parenting tasks where we've decided there's not an option to say, we will skip it tonight because you don't want to do it.
There are plenty of things in parenting where I'm very happy to say, let's try again tomorrow, or we don't actually need to do that.
You know, the whole pick your battles.
Toothbrushing is one of the battles in our house that we've chosen to make a hill to die on.
And this can be quite challenging if your child is finding toothbrushing genuinely difficult because you want to respect their autonomy and you want to listen when they communicate that something's unpleasant and you want to acknowledge their feelings and avoid unnecessary power struggles.
But at the same time, their teeth need brushing.
It is a long-term health concern, oral health.
So for us, the goal wasn't necessarily to find a strategy that made our children want to brush their teeth because children aren't always going to want to do it.
The goal was always to find ways to make a non-negotiable task more achievable.
So we need to make a distinction there between the boundary and the strategy.
So the boundary was relatively consistent.
We brush our teeth in the morning and in the evening.
But the strategy, how we brush our teeth, was super flexible and it could change completely depending on what we needed to do on the day.
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