As any experienced –and honest – parent will admit, we're all just making this stuff up as we go along. Parenting is as close to real-life on-the-job training as it gets.
This is never more evident than when it comes to health – and dental – issues.
How else do you explain roughly 97 percent of parents rating their kids' oral health good or great when we all know better? But then less than half of parents have actually talked to their pediatrician about their child's oral health at all. And nearly a quarter of them already have heard complaints from dentists that their kids are risking tooth decay or worse.
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All this comes out of a new study from MetLife, which also happens to point out that tooth decay is the single greatest childhood disease – far outstripping such classics as asthma and hay fever. Talk about your preventable epidemics…
Just looking at the numbers, it's pretty damning. According to the new study, 42 percent of parents 'fess up that their kids' teeth are brushed just once a day (or even less). And a whopping 45 percent admit their children never floss.
I mean, this ventures into after-school special stuff right here. But it gets worse. More than 60 percent of parents say their kids gobbling down sugary foods at least once a day. And I'd bet this box of Samoas on my desk that it's a lot more frequent than that.
Looking at these numbers, which are at least as bad as the latest jobs reports, it's gotta make you wonder: How can we possibly expect employees to make sound decisions about their own health care when they can't even follow simple dental standards for their own kids?
Are we maybe asking too much from a generation of workers incapable of even taking care of their own kids' teeth to expect them to make manage their own health care funding decisions? And are we putting too much responsibility on benefits managers to oversee this health care sea change? I mean, aside from enrollment, when do you talk to employees about issues like life insurance or disability, let alone dental care for their children?
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