Are you a nose breather or a mouth breather? Does it matter? Well we are so glad you asked because yes it definitely does matter!
Today I’m on the blog writing about a topic that has become near and dear to my heart which is oral rest posture. This sounds like a fancy name, but what it comes down to is the placement of your tongue, lips, and jaw between speaking and eating. Let’s take a moment to reflect… where does your tongue live when you aren’t using it? Is it touching your teeth? Does it rest in between your teeth? Is it down at the bottom? Or is it up along your hard palate?
Believe it or not the tongue is actually the natural palatal expander. Slow sustained pressure provided by your tongue on the roof of your mouth ensures that the bones of your mouth and your face grow correctly. Resting the tongue on the roof of the mouth allows your jaw to grow down and forward as well as resist the constant gravitational pull of your cheeks resulting in a high narrow palate if your tongue rests low in your mouth. Why is this important? The palate needs to grow and stay wide enough to be able to fit all of our teeth as we grow without crowding or malocclusion. The roof of the mouth is also the floor of the nasal cavity, we need to have enough space both in our mouth as well as in our nose for our airway to be open and for us to breathe through our nose.
I’m sure you can tell, but I could go on and on about this. For the sake of time in this blog let’s stop there with the tongue for now. More to come on this later. Next let’s tackle the lips. During typical resting posture your lips should be resting gently together completely closed sealing off your mouth and allowing your air to flow freely through your nose. The lips act as the natural braces for your teeth as they grow down into your mouth. Teeth have small sensors that will tell them when to stop growing, which is as soon as they have hit something in the mouth. Because of this, we want to leave a small space – called freeway space – in between our teeth as our mouth is at rest. Your jaw should not be clenched, and it should not be hanging wide open, but instead it should have about 3 centimeters of space in between your teeth allowing your tongue to lightly suction to the roof of your mouth and your lips to stay closed. Oral rest posture is important for a variety of reasons including cranial facial growth, oxygenation to the body, and even starting us off on the right foot for speaking and swallowing.
Contact us if you have questions about how this is impacting your child or what we can do to help! Until next time!
-Kasey-