Pardon me while I have myself an old man moment.
In my day, we were happy to get anything at all from the Tooth Fairy. I got everything from a few pennies to a loonie once or twice when they were just new to even totally forgotten one time when I used to stay through the week at the blind school. but there was no way in the deepest depths of the hubs of Hades that I was ever getting an average of $3.70 per tooth like the little brats today do.
Kids this year are getting an average of $3.70 per lost tooth, a 23 percent jump over last year’s rate of $3. And that’s a 42 percent spike from the $2.60 per tooth that the Tooth Fairy gave in 2011, according to a new survey by payment processor Visa Inc., released Friday with an update of the company’s Tooth Fairy personal finance app.
Writing the words Tooth Fairy personal finance app was not easy for me, I’ll have you know. that should not, under any circumstances, be a thing that exists. How complicated does the tooth falls out, caregiver digs in couch, sneakily puts found change under pillow of sleeping child and then pretends a magical being did it equation really need to be?
Parents are to blame for this of course, because parents have a tendency to be the absolute worst.
Part of the reason for the sharp rise: Parents don’t want their kids to be the ones at the playground who received the lowest amount.
“A kid who got a quarter would wonder why their tooth was worth less than the kid who got $5,” says Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist and professor at Golden Gate University.
To avoid that, Brian and Brittany Klems asked friends and co-workers what they were giving their kids. The Klems, who have three daughters and live in Cincinnati, settled on giving their six-year-old daughter Ella $5 for the first tooth that fell out, and $1 for any others. They say that $5 was enough without going overboard. They didn’t want other families to think they were giving too much.
Then Ella found out that one of her friends received $20 for a tooth.
$20? Who are you people, and what have you done with your good sense!?
There is, as with most marketing-driven/parenting-related articles, some completely ridiculous crap in here (antique typewriter?), but I have to say that I’m not totally against the $100 to the college fund and then a reward for being diligent about brushing your teeth idea. I doubt I’d do it unless the reward was on a much smaller scale, but at least there’s a method to the madness unlike with the rest of this insanity.
The girls got $1.00/tooth (when I could remember). When I didn’t I made up lovely excuses. (Fog over the valley grounded the tooth fairy but she’ll be back tonight. I would front the money and they would repay me when the tooth fairy showed up. A couple of times the tooth fairy left and iou (day before payday).
That’s a nice thing about kids. They’ll believe a lot of things. $1 is a nice, consistent amount, too.
left an iou – sorry.
Couldn’t believe I got away with “fog shutting down air travel”.
The time somebody slipped up and forgot to have the fairy pay me, I remember asking a teacher the next day about how that could possibly happen. I was told that the Tooth Fairy also had to visit her kids last night and that their house can be hard to get to. Perhaps getting there had taken too long and Tooth Fairy hours were over. I bought it. it made sense. If Santa and the Easter Bunny have to work under the cover of darkness, why wouldn’t she?