Okay, I’m going to confess something, and I don’t want you to think I’m a bad mother. I thought it was funny. And now, at age 12, so does my daughter.
One time – just once – I gave my little girl the same 50 cents for two lost teeth.
Like many parents have done, I crept into my little girl’s room in the wee hours of the night and left 50 cents under her pillow after she lost her first tooth. A few days later, she lost another one. That night I was too tired to look for any change, so I swiped the first 50 cents my daughter had left in a drawer in her room and used it for the Tooth Fairy’s second visit.
She never said anything about the missing 50 cents (probably because she forgot about the money), and I never said anything, either. After that the tooth fairy payment did increase. I started leaving a dollar for each tooth but never more than that.
A recent survey by Visa, however, found that kids are averaging about $3 per lost tooth, up 15 percent from last year. Some kids have received as much as $20 per tooth, reported Oliver St. John of USA Today.
Jason Alderman, Visa’s senior director of global financial education, said of the survey: “This is not only good news for kids, but an ideal teachable moment for parents to engage their children in thinking about how to budget their windfall by saving a portion.”
But hold up, wait a minute, say child psychologists. What are parents teaching kids in the first place by giving their children so much money for a tooth?
“I believe that it not only can be adverse to learning the values of things, but it can also be adverse to learning you earned things,” said Patricia Kirwin, a psychologist in Columbus, Ohio, the USA Today report said.
And it would appear some educators are also weighing in on the tooth inflation. Nobody wants to be the parent whose child is “the talk at recess,” because of a frugal Tooth Fairy, Amy Moncarz, a second-grade teacher at Lucy V. Barnsley Elementary School in Rockville, Md., told USA Today.
So, how much should you pay for a tooth?
Visa has created a free mobile app and online calculator that recommends what it considers an appropriate amount to leave for each lost tooth. The app and calculator use survey data and factors such as gender, age, home state, income and education level to show parents how much money comparable households are giving. The app is available on iTunes. You can find the calculator here.
While playing around with the calculator, I found some interesting payment suggestions. I plugged in information about a 40-year-old male living in Louisiana with a high school education and annual income of less than $25,000. Given that data, the tooth fairy calculator said this guy’s kid should get $4 per tooth. When I changed the subject’s education to graduate school and his income to $50,000 to $75,000 a year, the suggested amount was $1 per tooth.
So, I wouldn’t recommend the calculator -- I think it sends the wrong message to low-income parents. Just give what you can afford.
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