In it, she displayed dolls, drawings, books, and boxes that held baby teeth, and she sang songs about the Tooth Fairy and gave tours for visiting elementary school kids.Although cultures around the world have varying traditions marking a child’s lost tooth, the tooth fairy legend isn’t as old as you might think.
#TOOTHFAIRY STORY FREE#
That, in its final reductive wisdom, is precisely the vaunted magic of free enterprise.Īlthough Tuleja was interested in deconstructing the economics of the myth, Rosemary Wells was more interested in learning as much about the myth as she could, from as many people and cultures as she could. From 1993 until her death in 2000, Wells actually ran a Tooth Fairy Museum out of her house in Deerfield, Illinois. The Tooth Fairy's promise is more modern anything, even your own body, can be turned into gold. Santa Claus's promise is pre-monetary goodness gets you Barbies or a Rambo doll. The Tooth Fairy holds a shorter and less visible pedigree but her macroeconomic function, in today's society, differs only in degree. Tuleja concludes his article with the ultimate economic explanation of these magical gifting people:
Here in 2016, my daughter gets $1, but I know that several of her friends get as much as $5. Between 19, the average going rate of a lost tooth rose from 12 cents to 85 cents. While this may be stretching it a bit, Wells has shown that the Tooth Fairy's reward is indeed subject to inflation. "The market system," Tuleja writes, "cannot function without the continued surrender of hoarded goods: free exchange is its lifeblood." Parents are teaching their children about monetization and the free market when they exchange a tooth for money. That has generally been explained with reference to market economies. So we've explained the fairy and the exchange of teeth, but not really the financial aspect to the Tooth Fairy. And third, what else but the media! Just as Clement Moore created the modern American version of Santa Claus in the previous century, so too did the idea of good fairies and fairy godmothers run rampant on 1950s American childhoods thanks to Tinkerbell and Cinderella. Creating a family ritual about the transition from infancy to childhood makes more sense in this context. Who would give their literal last nickel to a child who had just lost a tooth during the Great Depression and other eras of scarcity? Second, the child-centered view of the American family dates to this period too, when it became normal for parents to cater to their children. Tuleja suggests three things that changed in American society following the end of WWII. What happened in the middle of the 20th century to change this minor folk belief into a full-fledged national myth? And yet the first Tooth Fairy reference citation - in the World Book encyclopedia - didn't come until 1979! For those of us who grew up with special pillows in which to put our deciduous teeth, this is quite frankly surprising. (Public domain image via wikimedia commons.)Ī story in Collier's magazine, one of the most popular of its time, mentioned the Tooth Fairy in 1949. Gray's Anatomy (1918) plate of cut-away view of child's jaw, showing both deciduous and permanent. The fairy-mouse then hides the teeth under the king's pillow, before eventually having him assassinated. The mouse turns out to be a fairy who frees the queen and knocks out the king's teeth. And in late 19th century France, one tradition has the Virgin Mary exchanging a coin or presents for a tooth left under a child's pillow.īut the closest parallel to the American Tooth Fairy may be an 18th century French fairy tale called La Bonne Petite Souris. In the story, a good queen is imprisoned by a bad king and enlists a mouse for help out of her predicament. There's also a Venetian version of the Italian Befana, who acts as Santa Claus, who gives presents or a coin to a child who has lost a tooth. Irish folk tradition includes fairy "changelings," so it's possible that a tooth placed near a sleeping child could serve to fool a malevolent spirit. There is an old British custom, for example, of giving "fairy coins" to servant girls while they slept but this doesn't involve teeth. We therefore have to start in Europe for Tooth Fairy precursors.
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