Bite means how your child's teeth meet when the mouth closes

In kid words

Your bite is how your top teeth and bottom teeth meet when you close your mouth. Try it right now: close your lips gently and feel where your teeth touch. Every kid's bite fits together a little differently, and that is perfectly normal.

The parent version

Dentists have a technical name for this: occlusion, the way the upper and lower teeth fit together. In general, a healthy bite lets the top and bottom teeth meet comfortably for biting and chewing, and a wide range of bites is considered typical rather than a single correct shape.

A child's bite is not fixed in place. As baby teeth give way to permanent ones and the jaw itself grows, the way the teeth meet commonly shifts over the years, which is one reason it gets watched over time rather than judged from a single visit. If anything about your child's bite looks or feels different to you, ask your pediatric dentist.

Where you might hear it at our office

Bite comes up most often around orthodontics, since growth and alignment are part of what gets checked at every routine visit. Most children's bites simply keep changing as they grow, and our team keeps an eye on that along the way. For some children, an early evaluation makes sense when growth calls for it, and that timing is always worked out with your pediatric dentist rather than read off an age chart.

You never need the word occlusion to bring up a concern. Telling us that the way your child's teeth come together looks different lately is plenty to start the conversation. More words like this one live in our Kids' Dental Dictionary.

Related words

Other words parents run into around bite: occlusion, overbite, and crossbite.