Overbite is the dental word for how far a child's upper front teeth reach over the lower front teeth.

In kid words

"Your top front teeth come down a little further over your bottom ones right now, and that's just how your smile is growing in." It isn't a size or shape you chose, and it isn't something to fix on your own. We simply take a look at how your teeth are meeting every time you come see us.

The parent version

Overbite describes how much a child's upper front teeth overlap the lower front teeth vertically when the mouth closes comfortably. Mainstream dental sources treat some amount of overlap as a normal, common feature of a developing bite, and the exact degree varies quite a bit from child to child.

Because jaws and teeth keep shifting through childhood, an overbite at five can look different by ten, which is part of why it tends to be watched over time rather than judged from a single visit. For what your own child's overbite looks like, ask your pediatric dentist.

Where you might hear it at our office

How a child's overbite is progressing is one of the things a pediatric dentist watches for during routine growth checks, right alongside teeth and gums. When it looks like a closer look would help, that next conversation happens with our orthodontics team. Because every child's growth moves at its own pace, the right timing for any evaluation is individualized and always decided together with your pediatric dentist, never off a general age chart.

Curious about another word from a visit? The rest of the Kids' Dental Dictionary is right here.

Related words

Words that often come up alongside overbite: bite, malocclusion, underbite, and crossbite.