When I was writing my tooth-fairy-themed children’s book UNDER MY PILLOW, I made a conscious decision not to name the dollar amount the tooth fairy left, or even to state, definitively, that she left money. Instead, I talked about the tooth fairy’s “gift,” which could be money but doesn’t have to be, and doesn’t even have to have any monetary value whatsoever. Not only did I want UNDER MY PILLOW to avoid setting unrealistic expectations, but as my editor pointed out, the idea of a “gift” is “simple”—simplicity being one of the hardest things to achieve in storytelling.
If what I just said seems backward, consider that it’s actually more difficult to write a simple description than a detailed one because simple descriptions are deceptively more complex. By saying less, they really say more, since they allow more “space” for the reader’s imagination. And everything the collective readership brings to an author’s book is way richer than anything any one author could ever produce!
Still, you came here because you wanted to know how much money the tooth fairy should pay. So, I’ll share how I did it with my girls, and you can adapt our method at will.
The tooth fairy’s “special coins.”
In one of her earliest letters to the tooth fairy (shown below), my daughter asked for “special coins” in exchange for her lost tooth.
I wanted to get creative but also work with what I had on hand, so I came up with the idea to put stickers on quarters. The first stickers I used were butterflies because they seemed cute and magical, like the tooth fairy herself—see below:
My daughter was so excited about the “special coins” when she found them under her pillow that I repeated the practice each time, varying my sticker choice according to what was happening in my girls’ lives. The day one daughter lost her tooth while eating ice cream, she received “special coins” decorated with ice cream stickers. When my other daughter developed a passion for volleyball, I found volleyball stickers to put on her quarters.
My daughter Julia’s note to the tooth fairy reads: “Here are the quarters you gave me. Please give me special ones.” The “special ones” have stickers on them. In case you’re wondering, it’s only illegal to put stickers on coins if you intend to put them back into circulation. My daughters put their “special coins” in their lost tooth scrapbooks.
The tooth fairy’s “upgraded special coins.”
As my girls grew older, a couple of stickered quarters quit doing the trick. I needed to up the stakes by upgrading the tooth fairy’s gifts. From two quarters, we graduated to a silver dollar coin. From there, we went to a crisp two-dollar bill. While silver dollars and two-dollar bills aren’t necessarily worth anything above their face value (unless you have some kind of collector’s edition), they are rare enough to feel extra special. These gifts went into my girls’ scrapbooks as well.
More creative ways to stretch the tooth fairy’s dollar.
Since my girls put their coins and bills in their scrapbooks, it was never about the money for them; rather, it was about having something special from the tooth fairy. After the two-dollar bills lost their novelty, I started folding regular dollar bills into fun origami shapes like a heart, an elephant, and a frog with stick-on googly eyes. For their very last baby tooth, each of my daughters received a twenty-dollar bill that they were actually allowed to spend or save as they wanted. I colored these bills with magic markers, which is legal so long as doing so does not change the bill’s denomination or destroy it.
An example of the origami “fan” the tooth fairy fashioned from a dollar bill.
What do you think? Should the tooth fairy give kids money? How might monetary gifts help kids learn about money? What other gifts could the tooth fairy give instead? One great alternative would be a copy of my tooth-fairy-themed children’s book UNDER MY PILLOW.
