Relationship between dental malocclusion with parent’s educational status

Objective: To determine the relationship between prevalence of malocclusion in children and parents educational status. Methods: A total of 2000 Saudi male and female subjects between the ages 12-16 years were selected randomly from secondary schools within Aseer region. Subjects presenting with identified systemic diseases were excluded from the study and were examined for malocclusion using a standard orthodontic assessment form. SPSS software, version 14.0, has been used to analyse the statistics of data thus collected. Results: The prevalence of malocclusion for children of parents with post-doctoral degrees was lowest at 76.6%. Parents with master’s degree show a slightly higher prevalence of malocclusion among their children at 4% and 8% in children of parents with only primary education. The highest prevalence of malocclusion was noted in subjects of the parents with Bachelor’s degrees (at 48%) and with secondary level education at 25%. Conclusion: The study shows that parents with higher levels of education have protective effect on their child’s occlusion probably due to better access to resources and higher level of motivation to interrupt habits which affected the child’s oral health. Further research involving larger sample size and distribution involving multiple co variables should be done to explore the potential role of various risk factors of malocclusion.