Kidz Planet Pediatric Dentistry

Skylark Drive runs behind Sam Rittenberg Boulevard in West Ashley, which puts this children-only office within a short drive of most of the elementary schools on that side of the Ashley River. Nobody over college age is on the patient list, and young adults with special healthcare needs stay on it well past the point at which many pediatric practices hand a patient over to a general dentist. Dr. Anna Phillips took the practice over in 2013 from Dr. Howard Peskin and runs it as part of a small Lowcountry group with sister offices in Summerville, Goose Creek, Beaufort, and Hilton Head. Parents are welcome to walk back into the treatment area with their child instead of waiting out front, which is the detail first-time families ask about most.

Children are not compact adults, and the difference shows up in what is even possible during a single appointment. A four-year-old has a working attention span of a few minutes, cannot reliably localize pain, and will sometimes describe an abscessed molar as a stomach ache. Pediatric treatment planning is therefore built around getting the most important thing done first, in the shortest window, and leaving the rest for a second visit rather than forcing one long one.

Silver diamine fluoride is a good illustration of how that logic changes the toolkit. Painted onto an active cavity, it halts the decay chemically — no drill, no injection — which makes it useful for a toddler who will not tolerate a handpiece, or for a child with several lesions who needs the worst of them stopped while treatment is staged over months. The honest trade-off is cosmetic: the arrested spot turns permanently dark, so it is generally reserved for back teeth or used as a holding measure before a proper filling.

The rest of the list runs through infant exams, digital x-rays, sealants, tooth-colored fillings and crowns, space maintainers, custom athletic mouthguards for kids in contact sports, and orthodontic treatment. Emergency and trauma care is offered as well, which in a children's practice usually means a front tooth knocked loose on a trampoline or a ball field. Appointments run 9:00am to 4:30pm on weekdays, which sits inside the school day rather than around it, and there is no evening or Saturday overflow to fall back on. For families in Avondale, Byrnes Down or off St. Andrews Boulevard the drive is a few minutes either way. Anyone coming from Mount Pleasant or Daniel Island crosses the peninsula twice for what may be a twenty-minute cleaning, which makes for a long morning with a small child in the back seat.