I went to elementary school in North America in the 1980s, and my classes always had five or six children of Greek immigrants. Once or twice each year, each of these Greek classmates would show up to school late but impeccably dressed (dress shoes and slacks, a collared shirt, and a bowtie for the boys, and dress shoes, a smart dress with white tights, and hair ribbons for the girls). On being quizzed about this, they would explain that they had had an appointment at the dentist’s. The rest of us non-Greek kids thought it was impressive but a little odd that anyone would go to all that trouble just to have one’s teeth checked.
I’m wondering whether the practice of dressing up children for routine dental exams is a purely Greek thing, or whether it’s endemic to other cultural groups. Was anyone here also snazzily attired by their parents for the purposes of monitoring oral hygiene? If so, where and when did you experience this, and do you have a particular immigrant background? Same question if you’re a parent yourself and have subjected your children to this practice.
I’m in the UK and as as an English kid, I just wore normal clothes (school uniform if I was coming directly from school.)
Same now I’m an adult (retired!)
In the waiting room, I’ve never seen anyone (adult or child) dressed up.
Dressing up nice to see the doctor once cut across a wide range of cultures, in my experience. I entered private practice in the mid 1980’s and had a lot of elderly (and not so elderly) patients from various backgrounds who wore their Sunday best to their visits to the medical clinic, and oftentimes were accompanied by their families who also dressed up. I suspect this principle applied to the dentist too.
I get the feeling that my current GP is mildly annoyed when I show up for an appointment in business attire. He doesn’t like waiting for me to take off my tie and unbutton my shirt and/or cuffs for whatever it is he needs to inspect/inject. Which is a bit odd, because he is super attentive in terms of listening to my medical complaints and discussing the diagnoses and treatments. Each appointment with him lasts two or three times longer than with any other doctor I’ve had; you’d think the extra fifteen seconds it takes me to disrobe a dress shirt would be seen as insignificant by comparison.
As I child, I couldn’t see the point to brushing my teeth before a dentist appointment, since part of what they did there was to clean my teeth. Do you wash your car before taking it to a car wash?
But then I reasoned that, the cleaner my teeth were already, the less time I might have to spend in the dentist chair having them cleaned. Which was a strong incentive at the time.
Only much later did I think about things from the dentist’s or hygenist’s point of view, having to poke around in a dirty mouth.
In my experience, the doctor is juggling three patients at the same time. So after the medical assistant checks my temperature, BP and pulse ox reading, I sit in the room alone for a bit, the doctor comes in, we talk briefly, doctor says to get undressed, leaves, comes back after a while, does the exam, says OK, get dressed, leaves again, and then comes back to wrap things up. So they’re never waiting for me to get undressed in front of them. I spend more time in the room alone than I do with either the doctor or the medical assistant.
Yeah, that’s how it’s usually been for me. But my current GP seems to have a purely serial workflow: it’s strictly one patient at a time. Everyone waits together in the waiting room until someone is called into the doctor’s office, at which point he asks the patient what the problem is and (if necessary) asks the patient to disrobe for any examination/treatment. Then the patient leaves, the doctor spends a few minutes alone (updating the patient’s medical file or whatever) and calls the next patient in. Medical assistants, who double as receptionists, stay in the reception area unless there’s some treatment or diagnostic procedure that the doctor can’t perform alone.
I’m sure it’s less efficient this way, but the service is so much more personalized, and you don’t feel like you’re a part in some assembly line.
When I had braces, there were a couple times that I had an orthodontist appointment right after school and didn’t have time to brush my teeth beforehand. Each time, the hygienist showed me these horrible pictures of what happens to teeth of people who have poor dental hygiene, implying that I would become another model for those photos.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and never got especially dressed up for any kind of medical appointment. If it was on a school day, I was in a uniform (through 8th grade) or decent, non-fancy clothing (high school) though if it was a summer appointment, I wore whatever I had around.
As an adult, I might try to put on something SLIGHTLY nicer than jeans and a T-shirt - most likely jeans and a sweater!
If I’d gone to a public school, and thus wore more casual stuff to school (maybe even old, not-good-condition daily wear) I could see parents wanting their kid to look a bit nicer for the doctor or dentist. Possibly a matter of pride, showing them you’re not trashy, etc.
I don’t remember what I wore to the dentist specifically; but in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, I put on a dress to be taken grocery shopping, so I expect I wore one to the dentist.
Starting in fifth grade we had to wear dresses to school, though (I was very indignant about that, but my mother backed the school), so I doubt I’d have had to put on a different dress for the dentist.
I suspect the kids were lying and cutting school with family permission - but not school permission - for a family occasion. Or even a religious event that wasn’t covered by the official school guidelines.
What, all seven of them, from different families, twice a year, every year, for eight years? The Greek community in my hometown must be super-organized and consistent when it comes to advising each other on truancy excuses.
Do we have anyone on these boards who is Greek or the child of Greek immigrants? If so, did you ever experience the sort of thing I noted in my OP?
Huh? If it were for a religious occasion then yeah, it wouldn’t be surprising of it were every one of them. But then claiming a dental appointment for an absence is hardly an out-there, unusual idea.
If you’re not saying it’s all of them at once then some meaning other than the dentist seems likely. All of the Greek kids going to the dentist in the same day really would be an amazing feat of organisation.
You sound very angry that I suggested an alternate explanation.
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that all the Greek kids visited the dentist (or claimed to) together on the same day. Each visited on a different day, and at a frequency that was in line with what one would expect for dental visits. (Health plans generally covered one or two visits per year.) I think the probability of there being some culture-specific expectation to dress up for dental visits is higher than the probability that all seven kids had a very short, dress-up family event twice a year, that all their parents used the same excuse for it every time, and that none of the kids admitted to their friends that it was a lie. (And come to think of it, wouldn’t it also mean some of the kids would be claiming to visit the dentist four times a year instead of two? After all, once the parents established the lie about having to dress their kids up for the dentist, they’d have to dress them up when they really did go to the dentist. And why didn’t any of the non-Greek families ever have family events that required removing the kids from school for an hour or two and dressing up?)
