Your Naples pediatric dentist works under a sixteen-foot whale shark.

Look up. That is the whole idea.

The first thing most children do inside this office is stop walking and tilt their head back. A sixteen-foot whale shark glides above the treatment bay, with Shades, our white dog in black sunglasses, riding along. A blue whale hangs over the lobby. Undersea murals climb the walls floor to ceiling, and screens above the treatment windows play underwater video, so there is something worth watching even in the middle of a cleaning.

Down at kid height there is more: the S.S. Flossy, our pirate nook, tied up and ready to board, and a deep-sea diver standing by for the photo that every parent ends up taking.

None of it is decoration for its own sake. A child who spends the first few minutes of an appointment climbing around a pirate ship walks to the chair already busy being delighted, and a delighted child is a far easier child to examine than a braced one. Dentistry for kids is half technique and half mood, and the room does a great deal of the second half before anyone says hello.

Parents usually notice the other half on the way out, which is that nobody had to talk their child into anything. The office handled it.

Where it is, from your side of town

1035 Piper Blvd, Suite 103, Naples, FL 34110. That is North Naples, just off Immokalee Road near the I-75 interchange, with Piper Blvd sitting right in behind it.

Coming up from the south end of town, US 41, the Tamiami Trail, runs north until it meets Immokalee Road, and you turn east there. Coming in off the interstate, take the Immokalee Road exit and head west. Coming down from the north, Immokalee Road is the road you are aiming for either way.

We would rather hand you the turns in person than post a map and hope. When you call to book, the front desk will walk you through it from wherever you are starting, including where to park and which door is ours.

What matters more than the turns is what happens once you are inside. This is the practice's Naples office, and the full range of pediatric dental care happens here, with the same team and the same one phone number that reaches our Fort Myers office. If you would like to see the rooms before you commit your child to them, every one of them is photographed on the Naples office tour.

A visit here, in short

The short version, because the long one is charted stop by stop on what to expect.

Come a few minutes early on purpose. Those minutes belong to your child and the whale shark, not to a clipboard, because new patient forms reach you ahead of time. Then a gentle exam, with every step explained in kid words before it happens, and teeth counted out loud. Then a cleaning, including the small spinning polisher that most children report as ticklish. Digital X-rays are taken only when they are genuinely needed, which for young children is often not at all.

The last few minutes go to coaching, aimed at your child as much as at you, and the next visit goes on the calendar before you leave.

For children under three, nearly all of that happens as a lap exam: your child sitting on you, facing you, the entire time. Nobody small gets handed to a stranger here.

The care that happens under that whale shark

Pediatric dentistry is not small adult dentistry, and this office is built for the whole span of childhood, from a first tooth to the last day of braces. The complete map lives on our services page. In practice, most families use some version of this list.

• Routine prevention. A comprehensive exam, a professional cleaning and a growth check at each routine visit, plus fluoride treatments while enamel is still forming and BPA-free dental sealants for the deep grooves of the back teeth, where cavities like to start.
• Repairs when they are needed. Tooth-colored composite fillings that preserve healthy tooth structure. Crowns when a tooth is too damaged for a filling, durable stainless steel on back molars and natural-looking resin up front. Nerve treatment, called a pulpotomy, to save a hurting tooth, usually finished with a crown.
• Gentle extractions and space maintainers. For the times a baby tooth has to leave before it meant to, so the permanent tooth underneath still has somewhere to arrive.
• Comfort options. Topical anesthetic cream, gentle local anesthetics, nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas, and IV sedation with a highly trained pediatric anesthesiologist for longer treatment plans or very anxious little patients. You will always discuss the options with your pediatric dentist first. Nothing happens without you.
• Care shaped around your child. Children with special healthcare needs get individualized attention here: extra time, a calmer room, and the same familiar team at every visit. Starting preventative care early matters especially, because unlike a great many health conditions, dental disease is preventable.

Growth and alignment get checked at every routine visit in Naples, so you always know where things stand. Comprehensive orthodontic care with Dr. Whitesides, our orthodontist, is offered at the Fort Myers office, coordinated as one practice on one phone number, so nothing about your child has to be explained twice.

And if the patient in question is still mostly gums, that is a specialty of this house too. Our page on infant dental care covers the first-birthday visit in full, lap exam and all.

Five free storybooks, one of them set in this building

The most useful thing a parent can do before a first visit is make the office familiar while your child is still safely at home. So we wrote the books ourselves.

The Storybook Reef holds five free original picture books, with printables to go alongside them, and the whole cast lives in these offices. Shades Meets the Whale Shark is set right here in Naples, under the very whale shark your child is about to stand beneath. The Bravest Little Diver is for the child whose stomach flips at the thought of going somewhere new. Goodnight, Reef finishes with the two-minute brush, which lets the book do the nagging instead of you.

They are free to read and free to print, and they live at the Storybook Reef. Read one the night before, then let your child walk in looking for a character they have already met.

When to start, and how to book

The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommends a first dental visit by the first birthday, or within six months of the first tooth arriving, whichever comes first. That timing surprises most parents, and it is not a scolding. It is the easiest possible version of the appointment: nothing to fix, nothing to dread, and a small person who learns early that the dentist is a place with a whale shark in it. After that, the rhythm settles into a checkup every six months, because checkups every six months keep little problems little.

If your child is well past the first birthday and has never been seen, book anyway. There is no late penalty here and no lecture waiting.

Booking happens by phone on purpose. Your child's health details stay in a conversation with our front desk, never typed into a website, and your new patient forms arrive ahead of time so you can fill them in at your own kitchen table instead of in our lobby.

Whatever you already know about your child is useful, so say it when you call. First visit ever. Gets nervous. Sensory sensitivities. Special healthcare needs. I would like to stay in the room. Prefiere español, and Dr. Torres speaks fluent English and Spanish. The team reads every one of those notes before you arrive.

One number reaches both offices, Monday to Friday, 8 to 5, and a real human picks it up: (239) 482-2722. If the whole practice is new to you, new patients covers everything this page did not.