Abstract
Communication between the patient, mother and dental staff is very important in dental treatment for children. Whether or not the mother should be present beside the dental chair during the treatment of her child must be decided on a case by case basis. This study considers the reasons for having the mother beside the dental chair.
The subjects were a total of 300 persons consisting of 100 children (aged 3 to 8 years), 100 pediatric dentists and 100 mothers. Fifty mothers were positioned beside the dental chair and the other 50 waited outside the treatment room. Twenty-four factors were examined, consisting of 8 which were child-related, 4 which were mother-related, 4 which were family-related and 8 which were dentist-related. The factors were examined on the basis of dental charts and three types of psychological tests, namely a psychological test on the distance between the mother and child, dental anxiety test for the mother and a personality test for the pediatric dentist. Discriminant analysis was carried out according to the second class of Hayashi's quantifying theory, with entrance or non-entrance into the treatment room or chosen as an external criterion.
The results are summarized as follows.
The ratio of the discriminant efficiency of external criteria to entrance or non-entrance was found to have a high correlation of 0.84. When the factors mentioned above were ranked according to the external criteria, their order was: “the desire of the child”, “the clinical experience of the pediatric dentist”, “ the treatment experience of the child”, “the number of brothers or sisters”, “the mother's way of thinking concerning presence in the treatment room” and “the adult personality on the egogram”.
