Maybe once, you believed in the tooth fairy. Maybe you always knew it was a hoax your parents told you about, mostly to make you excited instead of scared about losing teeth. (Losing teeth is still a reoccurring nightmare I have. You can probably analyze that all day and night.)
When it comes to telling your kids about the tooth fairy — and actually paying them for losing their baby teeth — many parents have a lot of mixed feelings. On one hand, why lie to your kids about a mystical fairy that doesn’t exist? Why give your kid money for something everyone’s body does? On the other, it can be seen as a fun and harmless way to insert magic and mystery into their lives.
But what if you forget to put money under your kid’s pillow? What should you tell your kid then? We posed this important question to our Facebook audience. Here’s what they told us:
“Go ahead down for breakfast, we’ll figure it out! Then I put the $ sort of squeezed between the mattress. That’s why it was hard to see.”
-CA
“She must have had an emergency, but I bet she’ll show up tonight.”
-RR
“She doesn’t work on Shabbat.”
-LB
“With my kids, either the ‘Your room was too messy and she couldn’t get to you’ or ‘Maybe we need to go to bed earlier tonight. If you were up too late last night we might have missed her’ would work.”
-AM
“One time we left a note saying that the tooth fairy couldn’t fly because her wings were too heavy from the recent rains. She left behind a note and a picture and then she followed up the next day. This was for a nephew of mine!”
-DE
“We used this: ‘There was a Great Taffy Outbreak in Australia and she was overwhelmed by all the lost teeth that she got behind schedule! I bet she will come tonight and leave a nice note.'”
-LW
“I’ve done several things. I snuck the $ *inside* the pillow case once the kid cried that nothing was left under the pillow. Then I told the child to check in there–that sometimes she thinks she’s under the pillow but accidentally slides into the pillow case.
I also once quickly made a scavenger hunt. Where I made a bunch of notes leading to the final $ prize in another location.”
-LS
“She couldn’t get it from underneath the pillow, because she’s so tiny and you’re so big now!
She couldn’t get through the mess on your floor without getting hurt.
Or if it can be swayed, putting it in the pillowcase and saying ‘h you missed it the first time!'”
-TS
“Busy night, so that means she pays you more for having to wait an extra night. Mind you I told my kid this because I went to get the tooth and couldn’t find it.”
-SB
“Traffic. Or engineering problems if they had a tooth pulled (in which case we do $5) and that amount of money is HEAVY for a fairy.”
-AM
“‘You know, the dog woke me up barking a couple times in the night…I bet she scared the tooth away!‘ I blame everything on the dog.”
-CB
