Tag Archives: tooth fairy

Tooth Fairy – American Folk Ritual

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/29/2023
Language: English

1. Text

When asked to share a folk belief, the informant responded with the following:

“The tooth fairy is a mythical creature that is very familiar to American children. They are taught that the tooth fairy will exchange their lost teeth for some kind of prize if they put them under their pillow before going to bed. Parents will often come in while the child is sleeping and swap the tooth out for a small gift, usually money, to make it look like the tooth fairy came.”

2. Context

Informant relation to the piece:

Informant learned the ritual from hearing kindergarten classmates talk about losing teeth. Informant is currently a college student. Informant is American and grew up in the states. They mentioned that at a “young enough age everyone believed in the tooth fairy” and was “upset when they realized that she isn’t real”. The ritual made the informant “excited to lose teeth” because it meant that they would get a gift that night. They realized the tooth fairy was not real around 8 years old when they caught their dad putting money under their pillow.

Informant interpretation of the piece:

The informant has no idea where the ritual originated, and suggests that maybe it started as a way to keep kids from being scared of losing baby teeth.

3. Analysis

The American folk ritual of the tooth fairy is tied to a life cycle event of aging where children lose their baby teeth and grow adult ones that last for the rest of their lives. This ritual is not tied to a specific time or date, but rather whenever a child loses a baby tooth. It also only happens for a limited amount of times before the child loses all their baby teeth. Since most children go through this process of losing teeth, it is a common and widespread ritual for American families. This ritual is mainly a form of deception from the parents to the children as they create a mythical figure called the tooth fairy to create a sense of magic and wonder in the children that they associate with losing teeth. This seemingly harmless form of deception or fictional storytelling from parents can also be observed in rituals such as Santa Claus bringing presents on Christmas Eve. This is interesting when compared to some Asian cultures which originally did not perform rituals such as the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. In Japan, when a child loses a baby tooth, they either throw it up on the roof or bury it in the dirt. There is no reward for losing the tooth like in the American Tooth Fairy ritual however it symbolizes the child maturing and wishing for good fortune and health for the child. In comparison the Japanese ritual does not involve deception from the parents as the American one does. Perhaps this speaks to how the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus act as a rite of passage for Americans, where most children believe in the mythical figures until a certain age and must deal with the realization that they were deceived by their parents, which motivates them to continue to pass down this rite of passage to their children. In a way this form of deception encapsulated in the tooth fairy ritual represents the loss of naivety and gaining of maturity when a child grows up. Since growing up often means learning a lot of unpleasant faces of the world, the tooth fairy ritual can act as a vaccine or initial exposure to American children in preparation for adulthood.

Doctor Mouse, Tooth Fairy

Nationality: American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/18/21
Primary Language: English

BACKGROUND: MS is the interviewer’s friend.


TRANSCRIPT:
MS: “In my family, instead of the Tooth Fairy we had ‘Dr. Mouse.’ I don’t think it’s done in just my family. I believe it has its origins in Mexico since it was on that side of the family, but I’m not sure if it was specific to a region or whatever. It’s functionally identical to the Tooth Fairy except I remember doing teeth in shoes rather than under pillows, so that the mouse MD could get to it.”


ANALYSIS: This is a regional custom, one that takes a common tradition of adolescence and remixes it. The shoes are a nice touch in adding to the realism of the ritual’s fantasy, as that’s the only way the mouse can access the teeth. 

The Tooth Fairy

Nationality: American
Age: 53
Occupation: Attorney
Residence: Baltimore, MD
Performance Date: May 2, 2021
Primary Language: English

Main piece: Every tooth you got a note from the tooth fairy, who was a woman – a Ms. Tooth Fairy. And she had a wand and a costume. And there was a rate for it. One tooth was $1, molars were $5, and the last tooth was a big deal, like 20 bucks. The fairy is magic. She’s real. She sent me a letter. But, you know, my children loved those notes. One of them kept all of them.

Background:  My informant is a fifty-three year old woman from Los Angeles, California. She is the mother of three children, aged twenty, sixteen, and fourteen. Whenever one of them would lose a tooth, they would receive some money (rates stated above), and a letter from the tooth fairy inquiring after their general well-being, and complimenting how big they’ve grown. To this day, whenever her children ask about the tooth fairy (including her eldest for the purposes of a folklore project), she adamantly says “she” is real. 

Context: The tooth fairy is a common folk character. The Western variation of this folklore states that if a child loses their tooth and leaves it under a pillow, the tooth fairy will come, take the tooth, and bring them money. In the case of my informant’s children, a note would accompany the typical tradition, and my informant continues to tell her children of its existence, even if they are old enough now to no longer believe in her. 

My informant told this story when I brought up Santa Claus as an example of a character rooted in folklore. 

Analysis: The folklore of being given money by the tooth fairy comes from the fear of losing one’s teeth- an otherwise horrific and scary occurrence for any young child to deal with. By rewarding or giving the child a present in exchange for the lost tooth, they are able to take something that would otherwise be seen as strange and scary and make it seem exciting or something to look forward to. The notes as an accompaniment to the money made the experiences of the children of my informant more personal, and having a stock character that wrote to them and comforted them made that experience even easier to handle. Additionally, my informant’s refusal to deny the existence of the tooth fairy to this day has more to do with her perspective than that of the kids’, as having a tooth fairy is part of childhood, and as the children grow up, they no longer need her and stop believing in her. My informant’s insistence of her continued existence in reality is her way of connecting the character with the childhood innocence of her children, even now that they are mostly grown up.  (For another version, see Stuurman, May 18, 2020, “The Tooth Fairy”, USC Folklore Archives)

The Tooth Fairy

Nationality: White American
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Orrinda, California
Performance Date: 4/24/2020
Primary Language: English

Context:

JA is a 20-year-old student from Orinda, California. She recalled this story in an interview.

Text:

JA: I don’t remember when I first learned of it… but the tooth fairy comes to your house the night after you lose a tooth when you’re a kid. You put your baby tooth under your pillow at night and while you’re asleep, the tooth fairy takes it and replaces it with a gift. So, like, in reality, your parents took your tooth and put something there.

But, anyhow, most people use money as the tooth fairy gift, but my parents always gave us these little toys. I think I got a nice marker once. Little toys like that. And I believed it when I was a little kid but I lost my teeth really slowly so by the time I lost my last baby teeth I was pretty old and had my suspicions (laughs.) And then when I lost my last baby tooth that night I felt my dad’s giant hand putting something under my pillow.

I don’t really know what to make of the whole thing, just that it’s a fun game to play to reward your child for the milestone of getting adult teeth. I remember talking about the tooth fairy with my friends in elementary school.

Thoughts:

The tooth fairy is a common legend in America. It is a tradition that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood through the changing of a person’s physiology. As the body changes, the child is rewarded, maybe to allay what Freud calls castration anxiety, or a fear of becoming disincorporated, a fear of alterations in the physical body. The tooth fairy is a way of transitioning kids through that process, celebrating it, and marking it as a significant and positive moment in the life of a child. I remember that my own parents gave me a homemade card for when I had learned how to cut my own nails. This gesture follows the same basic function that the tooth fairy does which is to mark a time of physiological change with a ritual designed to acknowledge mental and spiritual change, to allay the fear of the body being picked apart and to redirect that fear, sublimate it, toward a positive feeling of pride in maturation.

Tooth Fairy

Nationality: American (Norwegian heritage)
Age: 55
Occupation: Software Developer
Residence: Woodinville, Washington, USA
Performance Date: 4/29/20
Primary Language: English
Language: None

Informant: So. Tooth Fairy. I, actually, was always kinda questioning the Tooth Fairy. So when I was – I think it was probably around the third grade or so, when you lose your molars – I took my last molar, and – for us, instead of under the pillow, we put it in a glass of water, and set it by the bedside.

Me: Why??

Informant: That’s just how it happened. 

Me: They never told you, “You have to do this otherwise the Tooth Fairy won’t come…?”

Informant: That’s just how it was done. You don’t question it. That’s just how it was done. And you’d wake up and there’d be a quarter in the glass of water. 

Me: So… Your parents just fished into glasses of water to find teeth?

Informant: No, the tooth would still be in there. 

Me: You kept your tooth?

Informant: Yeah, got to keep the tooth.

Me: That’s… so different from everything else I’ve ever heard!

Informant: That’s the way we did it. So for my last tooth, I actually put it in the glass of water, and then I hid the glass, so I could prove – ‘cuz if it was smart enough to find it by my bed, should be smart enough to find it someplace else. Yeah. No. Didn’t find it. And I was like “A ha! Gotcha on that one.” 

Background:
The informant is the interviewer’s father. He is in his late fifties, and grew up in a rural farm town in Washington State. He was a child going through the whole thing with the Tooth Fairy in the early 70s. He’s also the youngest of three, with both older siblings considerably older, so his parents had gone through the Tooth Fairy rituals multiple times when he started losing teeth.

Thoughts: 
I also had questions about the Tooth Fairy, as I’m sure many people did, so I also hid one of my teeth and didn’t tell my parents. However, I did not ever put my teeth in glasses of water, or get money in the water. It was always done under my pillow, and everyone else I’ve talked to besides my father put teeth under their pillow too. I have no idea where the glass of water idea came from, and neither does he. I feel compelled to ask my grandparents now, or look into whether or not that was popular in Norway in the olden days, because my family is very Norwegian and adheres to those types of traditions sometimes.