The Teething Ring: The Baby Toy With Added Value

At the age of six months at the latest, your baby becomes uncomfortable: he is teething. The teething ring is now practical because your child can chew on it at any time. Increased salivation is no problem, because the teething ring is hygienic.

The soft nubs massage the aching gums. But why should the teething ring be in the fridge at least once in a while? You can find the answer to your questions here.

Teething Rings In Different Variants: Wood, Plastic Or Textiles

There is no ideal material. Some children like it when the teething ring has been in the refrigerator and cools the gums. Fine nubs can massage the aching gums. Other children prefer smooth teething rings that are pleasantly tempered.

Teething rings for babies are therefore made of wood and plastic as well as textiles. Perhaps you have already observed that your baby has the corner of his blanket or the ribbed cuff of his sweater in his mouth and chews blissfully on it? The rough texture of the textiles is also appreciated by many children.

It is important that the teething ring is hygienic for the baby. Textiles absorb saliva, and pathogens thrive excellently in a warm, moist environment. This is probably one reason why teething children often suffer from fever and get diarrhea or have a constant cold.

Plastic teething rings are the hygienic solution. Pathogens cannot multiply on the surface of these teething rings. With wood, the situation is different: The memory is accepted by the wood, it swells. You cannot boil a wooden teething ring or sterilize it in a vaporizer.

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With plastic teething rings, on the other hand, it is possible. A special feature is the gel-filled or water-filled teething rings: You can’t boil these teething rings or sterilize them in the vaporizer, but you can put them in the refrigerator. There, water or gel will store the low temperature.

If your baby bites on this teething ring, it cools the inflamed and swollen gums. At the same time, the teething rings, which usually have a soft, nubby plastic surface, can be washed off – so pathogens cannot multiply so easily.

The Teething Ring Is Important For The Healthy Development Of Teeth

Chewing on the teething ring strengthens your child’s jaw muscles. Biting ensures good blood circulation – a cooled teething ring reduces blood circulation. Both can be beneficial to health, depending on the condition of the gums.

But in any case, the teething ring provides the baby with less pain during teething. When buying a teething ring, you should make sure that it is compatible. It should not contain PV and harmful plasticizers. The material is best saliva tested and should not splinter or disintegrate.

Sharp edges pose a risk of injury – so the teething ring for the baby should have rounded shapes. Did you know that the teething ring in the mouth leads to more saliva flow and the saliva ensures naturally clean teeth?.

Therefore, teething rings are always a contribution to the dental health of your child! Of course, this is especially important if your baby is already receiving complimentary food. Stiftung Warentest and Ökotest have each conducted their own series of tests on various teething rings for babies.

The respective test winners are harmless to health and promote healthy tooth growth in your baby. Ökotest even awarded a teething ring made of natural rubber: Not only is it good for your baby, but it is also less harmful to the environment in production (and later disposal) than some other products.

What Should The Ideal Teething Ring For The Baby Look Like?

A teething ring is always a toy for the baby. And a toy for the baby must be safe, stimulating, and fun. Therefore, when buying a teething ring for your baby, you should make sure that it has an interesting design. It should be colorful so that your child likes to look at the ring.

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Smooth and rough or otherwise textured surfaces should alternate. Thick and thin elements promote the motor skills of your baby. It learns with this toy from 6 months, targeted to grasp and hold.

The different surfaces want to be explored and touched – both with the hands and with the tongue and lips. The chewing area is pleasantly massaged by the nubs, ripples, and incorporated elevations. This is good for teething.

Many children like it when the teething ring is sometimes harder and sometimes softer. Because on some days it simply does well when the material yields elastically under the pressure of chewing. On other days, more pressure has to be built up with a hard teething ring.

So you might want to keep several teething rings on hand for your baby. Manufacturers such as NUK offer combination teething ring sets. Your baby can puzzle together the various soft, hard, and cooling teething rings to form a structure and can choose whether soft or hard is just better.

Different sized nubs on the surfaces and small, protruding elements ensure that the chewer can be worked to the furthest corner. The teething aid offers similarly interesting concepts.

Here, a teething ring is shaped to cover the entire chewing ridge at once and rests between the upper and lower jaws like a brace or splint. From the outside, the teething aid looks almost like a pacifier.

Other teething rings are shaped like animals, have an abstract design, or consist of small rods and balls connected with thick natural ropes. The teething ring for your baby can also be a toy for the baby – but it does not have to be.

The Teething Ring Should Be Cleaned Regularly

Of course, you do not have to boil the teething ring for the baby after every use. This is also not necessary with textile teething rings. However, you should clean the teething rings made of plastic or wood thoroughly every evening with a little washing-up liquid under a jet of warm water.

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Textile toys that your child uses as teething rings must be washed regularly. Pay attention to the manufacturer’s instructions: most toys for the baby can be washed at 40° C or even 60° C in the washing machine. If the teething ring from the baby is made of plastic, it may often even be cleaned in the dishwasher.

What Are The Alternatives To The Teething Ring For The Baby?

If your grandma is still alive, you can certainly ask her what the teething ring for the baby looked like 70, 80, or 100 years ago. She might remember. There were no teething rings as we know them today. In the old days, people used to let the bread get hard. That was given to the children to chew and suck.

The idea was that the rough texture of the hard edges of the bread would pleasantly massage the gums during chewing and biting. In saliva, the bread slowly dissolved, becoming soft and mushy.

The children thus became accustomed to the taste of the bread and were introduced (quite sensibly when the first teeth were breaking through) to their first food. Here, toys for the baby combined with food and teething aid.

However, at that time bread was still baked by the children themselves and consisted of natural ingredients without any baking additives. So it was very digestible for children. You should not simply give your teething child bread from the supermarket or bakery. If you bake your own salt-free bread without additives, it is always an alternative to the teething ring.

We mentioned this earlier in the text: A teething ring or teething aid can also be made of textiles. Your child will put his cuddly toys, clothes, and bibs in his mouth more often anyway. If he finds the rough textures of the textiles pleasant, he will bite on them all by himself.

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If you want to support your child during teething, you can give him a gauze cloth. The cotton gauze of the so-called spit-up cloths absorbs a lot of liquid. Your child will therefore not salivate as much.

You can also wet the cloth at one corner and put it in the refrigerator (please put it in a sealable, clean zipper bag or a reusable, clean container).

The moisture cools down quickly and maintains the low temperature, so your baby can cool his aching gums with this improvised teething ring. Your child will like this unusual baby toy even better if you tie a knot in the corner of the cloth.

The little knot will then perform the same function as the nubs on the teething ring. With a textile toy for the baby, however, you should make sure that no parts can come loose.

Buttons, appliqués, dawdles, sewn-on eyes or plush surfaces pose a danger to your child. If small particles or individual parts come loose from these baby toys, they can get into the respiratory tract and lead to suffocation.

Conclusion: Teething Rings Make Teething Easier For Your Child If They Are Safe

Whether the baby’s teething ring is made of wood, plastic, or any other material is ultimately irrelevant. It is much more important than the material does not splinter and that no parts can come loose. The teething ring must not release any chemicals into your child’s saliva and should be free of plasticizers and PVC.

Sharp edges can cause injuries. Stiftung Warentest and Ökotest have tested which teething ring is really suitable for children. The results can be viewed online. If you don’t want to buy a teething ring as a toy for the baby, there are alternatives that can be found in every household with a baby.

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