Tooth fairy lies

Selfish Mom neglected her tooth fairy duties. [HT: Motherlode]

Jakie lost a tooth yesterday morning. It started bleeding at breakfast, and when he brushed his teeth a few minutes later, out it came. He put it in a plastic bag. We talked about it all day, and when he went to bed he put it under his pillow. And that was the last I thought about it.

Until this morning, when I got out of the shower and my husband informed that the tooth fairy hadn’t come. Shit.

I went downstairs, and Jake was in a ball on the couch pouting. I asked him what was wrong, and he started crying and said that the tooth fairy hadn’t given him any money.

I told him that that had happened to me a couple of times when I was his age. I told him that sometimes so many kids lose their teeth in one day that the tooth fairy can’t make it to all of the pillows, but that when that happens she usually gives a bonus dollar. At least that got him to stop crying.

This reminded me of one of my first posts on tooth fairies. Here is an extract:

On Thursday, our daughter lost her sixth tooth. On Friday morning, she woke up to tell us that the tooth fairy hadn't come. And then trouble ensued.

My initial reaction to this sad news was to go up and check her 'tooth box' carrying money in my hand in a vain attempt to suggest that she had just missed it being bleary eyed in the morning. This plan was aborted when I opened the box to find, well, a tooth. Obviously, to take the tooth now would be a tad too obvious.

On to plan B; imaginative lying. We settled on, "obviously, lots of children must have lost teeth on Thursday and the tooth fairy is just one fairy and can do so much. She will be here tonight." Our daughter bought that and, indeed, when discussing the incident with a friend, it turned out the same thing had happened to him once. (We must remember to thank the parents!)

So there is a broad parental conspiracy at work. That is the key to lying. Make sure it is the same lie and everyone toes the line.

That said, we didn't include the bonus. Instead, in our household, we have floated the tooth exchange rate.

The Tooth Rate of Exchange

I have written about Tooth Fairies and their economic role before. Today, comes a barometer of economic prosperity from DeCare Dental. They conduct a yearly survey of tooth fairy per tooth payments and apparently this year, it is down 15 percent. (Here is the a video of the news or here). Sadly, the data does not appear to be available on their site.

As I noted in my earlier post, there is an issue as to what a tooth ought to be worth and, in my opinion, it will be highly correlated with dental costs. The DeCare data might allow us to test that but that is something for another day.

The news provoked me into reporting our pricing policy. It is this: some proportion (perhaps 100 percent) of the change I happen to be carrying. On the very first tooth I saw through an issue: whatever we set this time might drive future payments. Moreover, they could only be inflationary. If I didn't have the correct change, I might be tempted to up the deal. We paid $1 for the first tooth and went on from there.

So on the second tooth, our daughter got less. On the third tooth she got more. In each case, it was explained that the tooth payment was set by the tooth fairy and there was no reason to expect that to be consistent.

The beauty of this is that every time some child looses a tooth we don't have to think. No worry about what the last payment was, what other children got, etc. And let me tell you, we need less of this type of thinking in our lives. We can just delve into our pockets and pull out an amount and go from there. This frees us of much of the mess associated with tooth financial management.

So I recommend a floating arrangement on tooth pricing as the 'customer' will come to expect it (something businesses often forget to take advantage of).