Yesterday’s post about pixie-dust on the dusty trail set me to thinking about other forms of faerie-dom. This includes that uniquely American form of monetized magic known as The Tooth Fairy.
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A recent Vox.com article by Lindsay King-Miller is titled “The Tooth Fairy Economy, Explained.” In it she explains that the going rate for baby teeth under the pillow currently averages $3.70 per molar. Also, the rate has historically fluctuated in sync with the S&P 500, beginning at $1.30 in 1998, and peaking at $4.50 in 2017. The capitalist correlation is explained by public radio as follows:
NPR’s Planet Money theorizes that the increase in tooth price over inflation is because when funds are more available, spending tends to increase disproportionately in the areas that people value most, such as creating treasured memories for one’s children.
According to folklorist Tad Tuleja, the Tooth Fairy’s main purpose is to teach children about the free market. Furthermore, you can now download apps that add the Tooth Fairy to photographs as proof for skeptical children. You can even call and leave her a voicemail. But monetizing childhood magic isn’t all the Tooth Fairy does. Consider this story about one Mom who…
…forgot to switch her daughter’s teeth for money on more than one occasion. But instead of confessing the sprite was a myth, she told her daughter that their Tooth Fairy was an under-performer at work. “I would have to pretend to be disappointed and tell her that I would email the tooth fairy’s supervisor,” she remembers. “After it happened a couple of times, her daughter would just say, ‘Mom, you need to email them again about the Tooth Fairy.’ ”
Oh man, ain’t the free market grand?
Our kids will attest that they got considerably less than the national per-bicuspid average. But it came in a form that perhaps shaped the future in ways we didn’t necessarily foresee at the time. Instead of leaving them familiar American dollars in exchange for their discarded deciduous teeth, we always left them some form of foreign currency. Our strategy was based on the perhaps fanciful premise that the Tooth Fairy is an internationalist at heart. She only stopped over at our house during long-haul travels to destinations mostly unfamiliar to us.
“Hmmmm,” we’d ponder aloud. “She must have come straight from <take your pick> “Mexico/Vietnam/Turkey/Honduras/France.” It was a way of expanding their horizons and at the same time saving a bit on the ever escalating cost of tooth enamel. They had no idea that the Yuen:Dollar exchange rate is 7:1 and therefore the cool Chinese coin under their pillow was worth the U.S. equivalent of 14 cents. To them, it was worth way more than a Sacajawea or a Kennedy because, well, it was exotic. And next time? It would be something totally different. That peso? Worth practically nothing at the going rate. But with the advantage of novelty, it became much more valuable in their eyes. That ruble? Worth even less than a peso after the Soviet Union’s ignominious collapse. But to our gap-toothed progeny, it was priceless.
Of course…
Little did we realize that our kids would end up traveling, living, and working abroad when they reached young adulthood. Stints in Chile, El Salvador, and the Republic of Georgia – not to mention India, China and (soon) England – have made our return on investment from those Tooth Fairy coins one of the grandest bargains of all time. Maybe it’s true “you only get what you pay for.” But sometimes, with a little bit of pixie-dust creativity added in, capitalist myth-making ends up paying dividends far beyond the S&P 500.
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.