Comparative Evaluation of the Impact of Parental Counselling on Child?s Behavior in Dental Operatory

Introduction: Parent's dental fear has been shown to have a significant impact on children's dental fear and behaviour and parental counselling can help them understand and manage their own dental anxieties, which can influence child behavior. Aim: Comparative evaluation of the impact of parental counselling on child?s behaviour in dental operatory. Materials and methods: A randomised clinical trial study was conducted on 40 children aged between 4 - 9 years to assess the impact of parental anxiety in child?s behaviour. Pre and post counselling evaluation was done by using Modified Frankel behaviour rating scale for dentist assessment of behaviour of child, Facial image scale for assessment of child's anxiety in his own terms, Parental cooperation scale for assessment of parent's behaviour. Results: The values were statistically analyzed using Wilcoxon Signed Ranked test and Mann - Whitney U test. Level of significance *P ? 0.05 was considered as statistically significant association. Discussion: Our results indicated that the children of counselled parents showed less anxiety because providing parents with information about what was expected and what they should tell their child before dental treatment was found to be an effective intervention in reducing the preoperative anxiety of the parents, which in turn reduced the anxiety in children. Conclusion: This study concludes that parental anxiety does have an influence on children anxiety and this linkage could be used for positive knowledge dissemination hence promoting positive dental attitude among both parents and children.