My Family and Other Globalizers | When children learn how to negotiate for more money

Children getting money and the parents getting stuck with a pitted tooth - that’s a raw deal, if ever there was one. (Representational image: Cottonbro Studios via Pexels)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

The edifice of modern parenting is based on one-sided transactions: parents nurture, educate, and financially support their children, until these offspring wander off into the world to make their own way, with only an occasional backward glance. But there are few instances of just how one-sided than the familial enactments around the tooth fairy, which involve the children getting money and the parents getting stuck with a pitted tooth. That’s a raw deal, if ever there was one.

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And yet, it is this fairy and her dental proclivities that has created some of our family’s most memorable moments of levity. When my older son was about seven, we were living in Indonesia where the local currency had more zeros than a leopard has spots. Ten thousand rupiah was approximately worth one US dollar. Consequently, whenever Ishaan lost a tooth, we would slip a couple of thousand rupiah under his pillow, believing that all the zeros would leave him feeling well recompensed.

But then one day as we went in to retrieve the tooth du jour, we found it wrapped within a letter requesting the tooth fairy to make a payment in Euros the next time she came around. This child showed an early talent for forex trading.

By the time child #2’s incisors began to drop, he’d been told by his older brother that tooth fairies were well, a fairy tale, invented by parents. Little Nico’s head told him to believe his brother, but his heart trusted in the fairy. As a follower of the scientific method, he decided to settle the matter one way or the other by conducting an experiment.

That night when I snuck into my boy’s bedroom with the panther-like stealth borne of much tooth-retrieving practice, I discovered not just a tooth, but a dozen tiny paper balls. Nico had placed these fake “teeth” alongside the real deal as an experiment. His ostensible hypothesis was that a parent would see through the ruse, but a real fairy would be taken in and compensate him for the entire scattering of “teeth”. It was evident to me that this was just a gambit to get the parents to pay more in order to have him profess faith for a little while longer, so that we could revel in his “innocence.”

There are few moments of greater pathos than when a child announces their loss of belief- in fairies/Santa Claus/mama’s ability to kiss and make everything better. For parents it signals a waning of their sun-like phase of life, when the children revolve around them, sparking a philosophical epiphany about the finiteness of existence. And this is something most children seem to be born with a nose to sniff out and cash in on. Nico’s attempt at getting us to persuade him to proclaim belief in the tooth fairy’s reality for a while longer, in exchange for more money for fake teeth, is but a case in point.

I realized my family was far from the only one with tooth fairy tales to share when coming across a tweet by author Vauhini Vara the other day, in which she asked for help on how to handle a situation with her eight-year-old. Apparently, Vara’s husband, who normally orchestrated bedtime was out of town. And so she was unprepared when her child informed her out of the blue that he knew the tooth fairy was a parental invention. The reason? His friend received $6 per tooth, but he only got $2 and therefore the natural explanation for this variance was parental parsimony. Vara said she panicked and told her son that in fact it was the friend’s “better teeth” that explained the difference in payment.

Among the replies to this tweet:

“Hah we’re having tooth fairy tonight too! She lost the tooth just before bed and I literally took the pound coin from her own piggy bank because we had no other cash around.”

and

“I told my kids that when you have a baby in the hospital, they make you fill out a form asking how much you want the tooth fairy to bring, and I put $1.”

It was after our move to Spain a couple of years ago that as a family we finally put the tooth fairy to bed, helped by the fact that in España, this fairy takes the form of a rat called “Ratón Perez,” and well no one in the Arias-Aiyar household feels the need to imagine rats sneaking under pillows in the dead of night. The molars of our tweens have therefore outgrown payment and are now just unceremoniously dumped in the trashcan.

And you, gentle reader? Does the tooth fairy still visit your home? Do share her adventures with us.