Actress Soleil Moon Frye late last week reached another milestone with her firstborn, 5-year-old Poet Sienna Rose Goldberg.
“Monumental mommy moment! Poet just lost her first tooth today! Had to share it with you guys. Now I am going to go and cry :)” she tweeted.
But once she got past the emotion, Frye had a rather important matter to sort out.
“What is the right amount for the tooth fairy to leave for a first tooth?” she tweeted.
This actually appears to be at the discretion of the parents and their socioeconomics, but folklorist Tad Tuleja pointed to post-World War II affluence, a child-directed family culture, and media as drivers.
“The tooth fairy is modeled after the exchange ritual of our capitalistic society,” he told the Chicago Tribune nearly 20 years ago. “Children learn to take an item, even a part of their body, and exchange for coin.”
But paid or not, the tooth fairy tradition has been used to encourage good oral hygiene, the late Rosemary Wells of Northwestern University observed.
Surveys of more than two million children in 2010 published in the American Dental Association’s monthly publication, Ortho, show the going rate for baby teeth is $1 per tooth but goes from as low as 25 cents to as much $20.
Perhaps lesser known to many is that permanent teeth lost through accident or other natural means, as opposed to extraction, also carry a monetary value. Because the occurrence is rarer — economic principles of supply and demand in action — they commanded $150.00 per tooth in 1995, the latest year for which information is available.
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