Dr. Andrew Bolas:

It should be out there in other forums also. The public health nurse should deliver the message too but the best-placed person is a dentist, who can give the example. When the first cavity appears, the dentist can say to the mother, "Let me show you what has happened". Parents will often come in and say their children were born with weak teeth, when it was the bottle they went to bed with every night that was the problem. Parents do not understand, and the dentist becomes the bad guy for saying it is the parents' fault, not the child's. The child did nothing to progress the decay; it was what the parents were doing. We need an investment in the current generation to obtain a benefit for the next. That is the way forward.