Beyond the Teeth: How Dr Rafif Tayara Approaches Children’s Growth, Breathing and Sleep

Dr Rafif Tayara, founder of JuniorDental and a paediatric dentist in Dubai, looks at a child’s teeth as one part of a larger picture: how the jaws grow, how the child breathes and how the child sleeps. She specialises in paediatric dentistry, children’s orthodontics and paediatric dental sleep medicine. Parents who want to know who leads the care at JuniorDental will find her background and approach below.

Background and Training

Dr Tayara comes from Montreal, in Quebec, and has Lebanese roots. She studied in Beirut, Montreal, California, Boston and Spain.

Love brought her to the UAE in 2009, and she is married to a Dutchman. The opportunities Dubai offered made her want to stay. “I came to Dubai for love, and I stayed to realise my dreams,” she says. In her view, the city rewards ambition, hard work and perseverance, and its openness to innovation and entrepreneurship encourages professionals to keep developing. It gave her room to grow as a clinician and as an entrepreneur, and to build projects she might not have imagined elsewhere.

How Her Career Took Shape

Science drew her first, human biology above all. How the body works fascinated her, and paediatric medicine appealed to her early. She has always valued the spontaneity and honesty of children, and paediatric dentistry let her combine her interest in science with her wish to care for them.

Her interests widened over the years. Children’s orthodontics, craniofacial growth and dental sleep medicine now sit alongside general paediatric dentistry in her work. She sees the role as reaching well beyond dental care, because the decisions she makes today may shape a child’s health, development and quality of life tomorrow.

The Whole Child, Starting With the Jaw

Facial growth does not rest on genetics alone, Dr Tayara points out. The way a child breathes and sleeps, together with tongue posture and oral habits, also influences how the face and jaws develop. A narrow jaw restricts airway space, and poor airway development affects sleep quality and cognitive performance, which explains why she pays close attention to function as well as to teeth.

Every standard exam at JuniorDental includes an airway evaluation that looks at jaw width, tongue posture, palate shape and breathing patterns, and assessments begin from birth. Early attention lets the team act while a child is still growing and prevent some complications.

A City of Many Cultures

Dubai’s cultural diversity ranks among the city’s greatest riches, she says. Patients and colleagues arrive from every corner of the world, and each culture brings a different way of communicating, different expectations and a different view of care. Trust, in her experience, starts with adapting, listening and understanding the differences.

The same openness shapes how she leads. A multicultural team calls for flexibility, emotional intelligence and leadership, and she works to bring people from different backgrounds around a shared vision and shared values. Medicine and business are two very different professions, she says, and in Dubai a clinic founder frequently has to master the two together.

The mix of cultures shows up in the exam room too. Children in Dubai arrive with a wide variety of facial structures, bites and jaw development patterns, so she adapts her approach to each child.

French has run through her years in the city as well. She has met French speakers from France, Lebanon, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and Africa, formed friendships along the way and looked after French-speaking families whose histories and cultures differ widely. A shared language, she says, lets people feel at home thousands of kilometres from their country of origin.

What Drives Her Work

Impact comes first. Dr Tayara calls it a unique privilege to accompany children through a formative stage of their growth and development. She also values the long view: an anxious child arrives, she earns the child’s trust, and the relationship sometimes lasts for years.

The science keeps moving, too. New technology and new findings on craniofacial growth keep her updating what she knows, and teaching other professionals has become central to her career. She shares her experience and helps move practice forward.

For her youngest patients, she wrote a book. Danny and Sarah Go to Dr. Smile prepares preschool-aged children for their first dental visit, and it is available on Amazon and in bookshops. Dr Tayara is also an international speaker and a mother of three.

Her Advice on Staying Healthy

Prevention comes first. Rather than wait for a problem to appear, she suggests building good habits: eating well, staying active, sleeping enough and paying attention to the signals the body sends. “Prevention remains our best investment for the future,” she says.

Presence comes second. People spend a great deal of time pursuing goals and planning tomorrow, she notes, and sometimes forget the present moment. She encourages slowing down, enjoying small pleasures, spending time with loved ones and disconnecting. Good health, as she sees it, covers the mind as well as the body.

Families curious about how Dr Tayara and her colleagues care for children are welcome to ask the JuniorDental team anything, from a first visit to jaw growth, breathing and sleep. The team is glad to help at any stage of a child’s growth.

‍