That Terrifying Sound: When Babies Start Grinding Their Teeth

2:14 AM. A Tuesday. I was wearing a pair of my husband's college sweatpants that hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine since the Obama administration, clutching a lukewarm mug of yesterday's French press coffee—don't judge me, caffeine is caffeine—and standing over Leo's crib like a sleep-deprived gargoyle.

He was eight months old. He had exactly two and a half teeth. And he was making a sound that I can only describe as a handful of aquarium gravel being ground up inside a garbage disposal.

Terrifying.

I actually thought he was choking on a rock he had somehow smuggled into his sleep sack. I shoved my hand into the crib, basically holding my breath, only to realize he was just aggressively sliding his tiny new upper incisor against his bottom ones. Scrrrrrch. Scrrrrrch. It sounded like he was trying to sand down his own skull. My own jaw started aching just listening to it.

The 3 AM Google spiral

If you're a parent, you already know what I did next. I went back to bed, pulled the covers over my head, and opened Google. Which is always a mistake. Always. I typed in things like "infant jaw snapping" and "will my baby grind his teeth into dust."

My husband, Mark, woke up to the blue light of my phone illuminating my panicked face. He squinted at me, mumbled something about how Leo was probably just stressed about the mortgage, and rolled over. Stressed? He's a baby. What's he stressed about? The pureed peas weren't warm enough?

Anyway, the internet told me he either had a rare neurological condition or he was just teething. Because of course. Everything in the first year of a baby's life is either totally normal teething or a medical emergency, with absolutely no middle ground.

Dr. Miller's reality check

I dragged him to the pediatrician the next morning. I literally hadn't showered. I just threw on a coat over the vintage sweatpants and practically ran into the clinic. Dr. Miller looked at me like I was a lunatic, which, to be fair, I was.

I mimicked the sound for her. She didn't even blink. She told me that, like, a huge percentage of kids do this. Bruxism, she called it. Sounds like a medieval spell, but whatever. From what I understood through my heavy exhaustion fog, it's mostly just them realizing they've new bones in their mouth and wanting to feel them. It totally changes the landscape of their mouth, and they're just exploring it.

Or it's teething pain, and they're basically creating their own counter-pressure to deal with the inflamed gums. Just like how you rub a sore shoulder, they grind a sore jaw. Oh, and sometimes it's because their ears hurt? I guess the jaw muscles connect to the ear tubes or something weird like that. Dr. Miller checked his ears, said they were perfectly fine, so we moved on.

The point is, she told me it's incredibly common and almost never does any permanent damage to their actual enamel. Because baby teeth are temporary anyway. They're going to fall out. Which made me feel about ninety percent better, even though the sound still made me want to crawl out of my own skin.

Desperate times and silicone animals

You can't really discipline an eight-month-old out of a habit. You just sort of shove a cold toy in their face and pray while rubbing their back in small desperate circles. We had to redirect him.

My absolute favorite thing we used for this—and I'm not kidding, I still have this thing saved in a memory box in the attic—was this Malaysian Tapir Teether. I know, a tapir. It's so specific and weirdly hipster, but Leo was obsessed with it. I think because it has this little heart-shaped cutout right in the middle that his chubby little fingers could actually grip without dropping it every four seconds.

When the grinding started during the day, I'd literally just launch this tapir at him. We kept it in the fridge next to the oat milk so it was always freezing cold. Dr. Miller said the cold helps numb the swelling, or maybe she just said cold feels good, I don't really remember. But it's solid, food-grade silicone and he would gnaw the absolute hell out of the tapir's snout instead of his own teeth. It was a massive lifesaver.

Oh, and my friend's baby—let's call him baby g—was doing the exact same grinding thing a few weeks later. He came over for a playdate and the two of them were just sitting on the rug, making that horrible scraping noise at each other. I ended up buying her a tapir too just so I wouldn't have to listen to it.

Now, we also tried to use mealtime as a distraction. We had this Bamboo Baby Spoon and Fork Set. Look, they're gorgeous. Aesthetically, they make you feel like a perfect earth-mother who only feeds her child organic pureed squash from a local farm. And the soft silicone tips are actually really great for eating. But as a teething distraction? Just okay.

Leo would finish his sweet potatoes and immediately try to flip the spoon around and use the hard bamboo handle to grind his teeth on. Which, honestly, made a horrible scraping wood-on-bone noise that was almost as bad as the teeth-on-teeth sound. I had to confiscate them the second he swallowed his last bite. Good for feeding, bad for bruxism.

If you're currently losing your mind over the noise and need to build a defensive arsenal, take a breath and browse through Kianao's organic teething toys to find something your kid will seriously want to chew on.

The wooden ring intervention

What did honestly work for the sensory counter-pressure thing, though, was the Fox Rattle Tooth Ring.

It has this hard beech wood ring attached to a crocheted fox. The wood is untreated and totally smooth, which is great because Leo treated it like a chew toy for a golden retriever. The hard wood gave him that deep pressure he was so desperately looking for when he clenched his jaw, but it was soft enough not to destroy his actual enamel. Plus, it rattles. He'd shake it, get distracted by the noise, shove it in his mouth, and totally forget he was trying to sand down his incisors.

The nighttime jaw clenching festival

Daytime grinding is one thing. You can easily distract them. But the nighttime grinding? Oh god.

You just lie there in the dark listening to it echoing through the baby monitor like a tiny, terrifying haunted house sound effect. Apparently, it happens a lot when they're moving between sleep cycles. Like, when they transition from deep sleep to light sleep, their little immature nervous systems just kind of short-circuit and they clench.

And remember how Mark jokingly said Leo was stressed? Well, he was sort of right. Dr. Miller mentioned that overstimulation during the day—like a super busy afternoon or a new loud environment—can genuinely make nighttime grinding worse. Their brains are just processing too much crap while they sleep.

So we had to totally overhaul our evenings. We stopped playing aggressive, screechy games of peek-a-boo right before bed. We started doing these ridiculously long, calming bath routines. Dim lights. Lavender lotion. The whole spa treatment. Did it cure the grinding completely? Absolutely not. But it did seem to make it happen less frequently, or at least he slept deeply enough that he wasn't constantly transitioning between sleep cycles and waking himself up with the sound.

Maya's turn and caring way less

Three years later, my daughter Maya got her first teeth.

We were sitting at the kitchen island. I was drinking coffee (obviously, always). She was playing with some blocks. And she just casually looked up at me and went scrrrrchhhh with her jaw.

I didn't panic. I didn't Google anything. I didn't even flinch. I just handed her a frozen washcloth, said "gross, dude," and went back to my email.

It's wild how the exact same sound that sent me into a 3 AM tailspin with my first kid barely registered with my second. It really is just a phase. They all do it. And they eventually stop when they get more teeth, or when they find a new, equally annoying habit to replace it with. Like throwing their sippy cup repeatedly onto the hardwood floor just to watch me pick it up.

So if you're currently spiraling because your infant sounds like they're chewing rocks, please stop, go pour yourself a giant cup of coffee, and grab a couple of solid teethers from Kianao to save your sanity. You will get through this. Your baby's teeth will be fine. Your eardrums might take a beating, but you'll survive.

The messy questions I asked my pediatrician (and you probably are too)

Should I wake my baby up if they're grinding their teeth in their sleep?

Hell no. Never wake a sleeping baby. Seriously, just turn the volume down on the baby monitor so you don't have to hear it. Waking them up just makes them cranky, and it doesn't teach them not to do it because they don't even know they're doing it in the first place. Let them sleep. Protect your own peace.

Can they really break a tooth doing this?

I asked my pediatric dentist this exact thing because Leo was going at it so hard I thought his teeth were going to shatter. She told me that while minor wear and tear happens, it's super rare for a baby to really crack a tooth just from grinding. Baby teeth are temporary anyway. If you notice them flinching when they eat hot or cold food, or if the teeth look visibly flattened, then maybe call your dentist. But mostly, it's just noisy and annoying.

When do they finally stop making this awful noise?

For us, it sort of faded out right around the time Leo turned one and a half. Dr. Miller said most kids outgrow the infant grinding phase once their primary teeth fully come in, or when they just get bored of the sensation. It usually flares up when a new tooth erupts, sticks around for a few weeks, and then vanishes. Until the molars come. Then God help you.

Are wooden or silicone teethers better for redirecting the grinding?

Honestly, you need both. It totally depends on the day and the baby's mood. Sometimes Maya wanted the squishy, freezing cold silicone of the tapir toy because her gums were inflamed and hot. Other days, she wanted the rock-hard resistance of the wooden fox ring to really dig her jaw into. Buy one of each and see which one they throw on the floor less.

Does a pacifier help with nighttime grinding?

It can! It basically is a little bumper between the top and bottom teeth. But here's the catch—if your baby is like mine, they'll spit the pacifier out the second they fall asleep anyway, and then start grinding an hour later. So it's a great buffer if they genuinely keep it in their mouth, but I wouldn't rely on it as a magical cure if they're chronic pacifier-spitters.