The Tooth Fairy is buzzing right now, thanks to the just-released movie.  I confess I have not seen it: The pleasure of sitting next to my silent kids in the dark, working on a nice transfatty high, is outweighed by the prospect of watching some bruiser once called The Rock stuffed into a tutu, preaching to me about the power of following one’s dreams.

Our staying home may all be to the good, anyway-and not just because Raisinets are tooth enamel’s greatest enemy. Rather than allowing Disney to brand her for all eternity, the tooth fairy is perhaps  best left to the imagination. (I would have cast Tinkerbell, not Julie Andrews, in the role, anyway.) The mysterious tooth fairy offers fertile ground indeed for young imaginations. Santa is known to have reindeers, elves, a wife, a deadline, even a street address: The tooth fairy only has pocket change. Where does she live? What does she do with the teeth she collects? How does she get into your bedroom unseen? Why did she leave a dollar for that eyetooth you swallowed whole?  All these details need to be limned by young believers.

It may come as no surprise that there’s a brain trust out there hard at work studying children’s beliefs in the tooth fairy. In an often quoted study, psychology professor Jacqueline Wooley found that 65 percent of 5-year-olds believed, dropping to 25 percent by age 9. (While kids can make the distinction between real and not real at age three, the following years are spent weighing evidence pro and con for their belief: The coin under the pillow vs. the naysaying know-it-all in homeroom.) In Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children’s Myths in Contemporary America, psychology professor Cindy Dell Clark devotes a chapter to explicating  the Tooth Fairy, including documenting the lengths parents go to encourage their children’s beliefs. (One parent described her practice of writing notes to her children in teensy script; A boy speculates that the tooth fairy resides in a dentist-office drawer.)

What’s at stake, besides a few crisp bills with drool marks?  The tooth fairy is a player in the new thinking about children’s imagination that’s been percolating in the past decade or so. Fantasy, such as a belief in the wee winged one, was once considered largely frivolous, a childish thing to be put away when the “real world” of adulthood came along.     

In fact, the new thinking goes, the ability to imagine something unseen and untouchable  is a crucial tool in our understanding of the real world around us. “Whenever you think about the Civil War or the Roman Empire or possibly God, you’re using your imagination,” Paul Harris, a development psychologist and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Shirley S. Wang of the Wall Street Journal .” The imagination is absolutely vital for contemplating reality, not just those things we take to be mere fantasy.”  By this logic, the iPad was possible because humans had the ability to imagine something that didn’t exist…yet.

Over the past decade, the tooth fairy has been a frequent visitor to our house. She only stopped coming this year, around the time my youngest turned eight—just as Wooley might have predicted.  (Ethan believed that the tooth fairy used his cast-offs to make fanciful constructions: a kind of carbon-based LEGO, I guess.)  Instead of making money off this commodity, we are now forking over huge sums to the orthodontist. 

When Ethan found a stash  of baby teeth deep in a bathroom cabinet recently, I was able to use my vivid imagination—honed, I now understand, through my own childhood fantasies—to offer immediate reply. “Yes, those are your baby teeth!” I parried. “I sometimes used to find them in the grass in the morning. The tooth fairy’s bag must have ripped.”

Photo: Robert S. Donovan

Let’s talk teeth. How do you and yours envision the tooth fairy? What’s the going rate for teeth in your neighborhood?

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