Imagine that your child heads to a sleepover party, and while there loses a tooth. Imagine then that the Tooth Fairy at that house slipped a $10 note under the pillow, when the Tooth Fairy that visits your place is only good for a fiver.
Awkward.
That’s exactly what happened to journalist Dilvin Yasa, who left her nine-year-old daughter bewildered at the currency discrepancy between different real estate (and Yasa herself shocked that a Tooth Fairy wouldn’t check in to help a mother out, ya know?).
Writing for Nine Honey, Yasa appreciates the other fairy’s generosity, but has to wonder how this new precedent is going to affect her own fairy’s hip pocket moving forward.
$10? Pffft. Some fairies are dropping fiddies
The thing about kids is they talk. All the best-laid plans of parents and fairies alike can come undone when little Tommy blabs that his fairy is dropping pineapples. Yep, according to Nasa, certain ‘fairies’ in her circle are leaving $10, $20 and even $50 notes on occasion – a figure she said “astounds” her.
“All it takes is for one kid to go into the playground with a thick gold chain around their neck, rapping tales about ‘da fiddy’ from the Tooth Fairy for the rest of the kids (OK, my kid in particular) to begin asking some very angry questions,” she says.
And she’s right. The ‘Tooth Fairy that comes to my place has a stash of tumble-stone crystals that, for many years, she would exchange for teeth. Pretty fairy-like idea, right? I thought so.
Well, the idea was cute until the kids found out that other kids were getting cold-hard cash. Now the Tooth Fairy that comes to my place needs to cough up coin alongside the crystals too.
So what is the going rate?
Sadly, there is no Tooth Fairy union. So the prices range according to a variety of reasons.
The Original Tooth Fairy Poll, run by Delta Dental, has been recording the going rate for a tooth since 1998 and in 2016 there was an all-time high average for cash payouts. However, that has dropped in 2018, with US kids scoring an average of $4.13 per pearly white, which is an 11 per cent dip on last year’s results.
For those wanting a more detailed analysis, they can use the Tooth Fairy Calculator from Practical Money Skills for Life to determine what the Tooth Fairy leaves under your child’s pillow by entering information like gender, education, state, age, family size, marital status and household income.
The app also shows how inflation affects the amount, and compares what children are receiving now versus what they received decades ago.
Although, for most of us, it’s the change we can scrounge up in the lounge that gets the magic Fairy treatment.
“I leave whatever change I can find. The biggest problem for me is remembering to do it in the first place,” says mum-of-two Natalie.
“For me, it’s a gold coin. Always. I even raid the kids money boxes if I have to find one,” admits mum-of-three Katie.
In fact, none of the people I spoke to had launched into fiddies yet. Here’s hoping none of our kids get online today and get any ideas, right?
