Impact of verbal explanation on parental acceptance level of different behavior management techniques in dental office

Background and aim: parents’ attitudes towards different aspects of dentistry especially the use of behavior management techniques (bmts) can greatly effect a child’s cooperation in a dental office. the present quasi-experimental study was conducted with the aim to assess the effect of a verbal explanation on parents’ acceptance level of the most common bmts used in pediatric dentistry. methods: a videotaped presentation showing the 6 most commonly used bmts in iran was presented to 60 parents recruited by a convenient sampling method. using visual analogue scale (vas), the acceptance level of each bmt was measured before and after an explanation on the reasons of each bmt. paired t-test, repeated measures analysis of variance (anova) and independent t-test were used for statistical analysis of data. significance level was set as 0.050. results: giving a verbal explanation on bmts had a statistically significant effect on the acceptance of bmts. tell-show-do (tsd) and hand-over-mouth (hom) techniques achieved the highest and lowest mean scores of parental acceptance, respectively. the acceptance of physical restraint (p = 0.013) and parental presence/absence (ppa) (p = 0.015) of parents was obtained higher among men compared to women using t-test. conclusion: giving an explanation to parents while performing a bmt is effective in raising parents' acceptance of the technique. non-invasive methods such as tsd and ppa of parents are the more favorable methods to parents.