Earlier isn’t always better.

A friend texted me a photo of her seven-year-old’s gappy smile last weekend. The text read: “Should we be panicking?”

Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: come see me, but don’t pack a suitcase.

The American Association of Orthodontists recommends a first orthodontic check around age seven. That’s the headline most parents have heard. What they sometimes miss is the verb: check, not treat. By seven, most permanent molars are in and the dental arches are showing their cards. We can see the architecture early. That doesn’t mean we have to start swinging hammers.

There are cases where intercepting early genuinely changes the trajectory. Crossbites — where upper teeth bite inside lower teeth on one or both sides — start to drag the lower jaw off-centre if left long enough. Severe crowding with permanent canines on a collision course can be eased with strategic baby-tooth extractions. Thumb habits driving an anterior open bite respond well to a small appliance and a parent willing to be the reminder. Jaw asymmetries quietly establishing themselves between ages eight and ten are easier to course-correct while the growth plates are still cooperating.

But for most kids? The seven-year-old with mildly crooked front teeth and good bite alignment is fine. Their teeth at eleven won’t be the same teeth I’m looking at today. Some of what worries parents at seven solves itself.

I see this in my own circle. A close friend has a daughter whose lower incisors came in stacked and dramatically overlapping. Mum was ready to book braces the next afternoon. I asked her to wait. Two years later, with the second molars in and a few millimetres more arch length, the lower teeth had self-corrected almost completely. We never started treatment. It would have been faster — and considerably more expensive — to start when she first asked.

That’s not always how it goes. Sometimes I see a child at seven and quietly start budgeting their family for a phase-one appliance. But the honest version of orthodontics for kids is: come in by seven, let me look, and we’ll decide together. The right answer is sometimes now, sometimes next year, sometimes we’ll watch this, and occasionally we don’t actually need to do anything.

The hardest one for me to say is the last one. Parents have already taken the afternoon off work. They’re in my chair expecting an action plan. Telling them “we wait” can feel anticlimactic. But the cost of treating something that didn’t need treating — eighteen months of compliance, brackets, cleaning routines, retainer drama — is real. Not just financial. It’s a child’s relationship with their own mouth.

So if you’re a parent reading this: yes, come in by seven. No, you’re probably not behind. The window for good orthodontic timing is wider than the internet suggests, and the right intervention is sometimes patience.