Restoring the oral health of the child.

We practice in a country in which 80 percent of oral disease is localized in 20 percent of the children. Restorative care is not about to vanish from the face of the earth, however. Present practice and treatment protocols, and those of the future, are necessarily based on an evolutionary development of restorative dentistry over a period of the last twenty years. The explosion in the use of adhesive technologies and the attention to acceptable esthetics come to the forefront of important developments, as will be the identifying and employing of truly biologically compatible materials. What are also needed are continuing efforts to develop new modalities of restorative care, pulp therapy, and trauma care. Advances in these areas are reviewed; they first appeared in the Journal under editor George Teuscher's selecting and publishing for the profession significant articles that advanced dentistry for the child and the adolescent.