Welcome to Talking About Children’s Oral Health — a toolkit compendium of materials on how Americans think about children’s oral health, and how to increase public support for policies and programs that support children’s oral health.

This toolkit includes a variety of application materials, that are designed to reflect the research findings. Using these templates to build communications can help engage the public in understanding children’s oral health in a deeper way, thereby improving the public conversation and decision-making about this issue.

FrameWorks has also developed Watch Your Mouth, a public awareness campaign for coalitions wishing to advance children’s oral health in their communities and states. For more information about this campaign, contact us at: info@frameworksinstitute.org.

This toolkit was developed by the FrameWorks Institute for the DentaQuest Foundation.

Message Memo

Framing Children’s Oral Health for Public Understanding and Support. (2005; revised 2011). This MessageMemo summarizes the findings from our research, and provides advocates and experts with a communications map for improving the public’s understanding of children’s oral health and the value of solutions that public health practitioners and policy leaders seek to advance.

eWorkshop

The Watch Your Mouth eWorkshop is an hour-long, highly visual web-based tool that will take you through the research findings on children’s oral health and test your framing IQ in a series of interactive exercises.

Applications

This section provides a variety of framing tools intended to help advocates understand and apply the research findings and recommendations on how to talk about children’s oral health.

Talking Points  A reminder of the basic elements of the children's oral health frame for use in preparation for media interviews, editorial board visits, or other public communications.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Common questions about children's oral health, with examples of effective and less-effective responses to each question.
Sample Opinion Editorials  Three examples of how to apply the framing strategies on children’s oral health to the format of guest editorials in a newspaper.
Children’s Oral Health Case Study Examples  Two case studies from children’s oral health advocates examining communications materials that reflect framing recommendations.
1. Fact Sheet
2. Press Release
Telling Thematic Stories: A FrameWorks Institute FrameByte  This FrameByte examines how episodic and thematic stories differ, and emphasizes the importance of telling thematic stories to advance the public conversation about oral health.
Communicating About Disparities in Children’s Oral Health: A FrameWorks Institute FrameByte  This FrameByte discusses the need to effectively frame conversations about disparities in children’s oral health.

Key Framing Guides

Navigating the Swamp. A graphic representation of the swamp of dominant patterns of thinking about children’s oral health. This can serve as a reminder of the themes in public thinking that your communications should avoid.
You Say…They Think.   An analysis of a series frame clashes — you say one thing and the public thinks another — which shows how certain ways of framing children’s oral health can get eaten in the swamp.
Basic Message Template. The outline of a new frame for communicating about children’s oral health. The Talking Points, FAQs and Sample Op-Eds in this toolkit show a variety of ways to apply this basic template.

Research

From the Mouths of Babes: How the Media Frames the Issue of Child Oral Health. (2009) This report examines more than a year‘s worth of news coverage on this issue (from August 2008 to November 2009) from more than a dozen newspapers nationwide. The findings from this work serve to enhance the communications strategy that advances a more constructive public conversation around children‘s oral health.
FrameWorks Research on Children’s Oral Health (2005) A summary of the research on children’s oral health that informs the communications recommendations.