Last night my 9-year-old was at his dad’s house, and lost a tooth. Apparently his dad was not careful when placing the money under the pillow, and son woke up and caught him. Dad confessed the truth, son was very upset.
I dread picking my son up today and having this conversation, as I am pretty sure that as the Tooth Fairy goes, so goes Santa and Easter Bunny and leprechauns.
I am not sure how to address this. We have had conversations of late about son “stretching the truth” and the importance of being honest, and I’m not sure how to handle the obvious questions about me lying to him for years about the Tooth Fairy et al.
I’m also very sad to lose another piece of his innocence on the way to adulthood.
I don’t have much by way of advice. I only popped in to say, as a new mom, I don’t know how the hell I’m going to handle all this.
The tooth fairy seems easier to explain away. “We created this fictional character to make loosing your teeth not seem so weird and gross.” But Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny have religious connotations. And what about Jesus, and all that shenanigans. Ooof.
I was raised Catholic. I just don’t know. My kid is 13 months old, so I better figure it out.
I was the worst Tooth Fairy ever. I got busted more than once with my hand under the pillow, but played it off: “I was just checking to see if she came yet! Did she?”
Once I left the money (a quarter, as is traditional) but couldn’t find the darned tooth. Of course, the girl found it next morning and was dismayed. I told her the Tooth Fairy must have dropped it on her way out.
I feel ya on this one. Our 9 year-old lost a tooth a few weeks ago and the tooth fairy forgot to stop by for a few days. Not sure if the little one bought it, but we know the time is coming when either one of her friends reveals the truth or we get caught.
My kid finding out the truth about the Tooth Fairy was traumatic for me. He figured that since I was the one really doing it, he should get more money per fang.
I got him back. When he was a hip teenager, I told him he needed to leave beer and hookers for Santa instead of cookies and milk.
Kids are mostly okay with the concept of “pretend,” so try to explain it in that context. I was a very literal child, and was upset that my parents lied to me, but I got over it ok (although I don’t think I’d do the tooth fairy or santa claus for my own kids, because I’m atheist and because I don’t want them to have any trust issues, no matter how temporary). Once I learned the truth, I didn’t spoil it for my younger sister or classmates. So emphasize that you don’t want him to spoil the fun for anybody else. Nobody should have to stop pretending until they’re ready, that kind of thing.
I lost a tooth one night when we had a babysitter so my parents could go out for dinner or something. She forgot to tell my parents when they got home. The next morning I woke up and my tooth was still there. I went running downstairs wailing, “The Tooth Fairy hates me Mamma!”. So she had to explain it. It’s true that you kinda figure out the rest of them after that. But I had enough hope they were real that we just never talked about it so I got a few more years of a real Santa in.
By the age of 9 they should be figuring it out one way or another anyway. He was going to find out soon. He’d hear it at school, catch you or his dad in the act, read about it, or just develop some smarts. So it’s not going to be all that tough a time, tell him how you believed in it when you were a kid and how you found out. No harm done.
As for Christmas just make sure he gets the misimpression that you don’t get presents if you don’t believe in Santa Claus. He won’t believe that, but when he finds out the truth he won’t make a big deal out of it.
Every year on St. Patty’s Eve we set a leprechaun trap to try to catch one. They usually involve cardboard boxes with trapdoors, nets, etc. using shiny objects and shoes as bait (they are cobblers by trade, you see, so they like fixing shoes). This year’s trap included sticky mousetraps. I guess those will end too!
We went through this recently with our 8 and 10 year old, and the way we handled it wasn’t such a sudden transition…the kids started kinda maybe figuring it out and so my talk about Tooth Fairy and Santa got more broad and “wink-wink”. I acted as if they were already in on the joke but we had an unspoken agreement to keep pretending. Before long the unspoken agreement became a real thing and now I check with my kids when they lose a tooth, whether the tooth fairy really needs to come tonight or can she maybe stop by on the weekend when she doesn’t have to get up at 5:15 to get ready for work.
I don’t remember my son having a revelation about the Tooth Fairy, it was more just something he noodled out on his own. I think he only lasted that long because I used to keep a roll of gold dollar coins around and use those as the “reward”. Since he never saw them in any other context, a gold coin just had to be from someone special.
Santa he figured out by age ten (I suspect he figured it out at least a year earlier and just didn’t want to say) and the Easter Bunny was never a “thing”. He’d get a basket nominally from the EB but was never under the illusion that a rabbit actually delivered it.
Yes, because you can’t catch a leprechaun that way. You have to get them drunk. I know they’re real, I didn’t speak to one personally, but I spoke to his secretary, and then he sent my kids a note, signed “Lucky”. I don’t why people think they’re not real.
That said, 9 seems old enough to be finding out about this stuff anyway. (Easy for me to say, my kid’s only 4.)
This year we did leprechauns too, only we didn’t set traps for them. We left the leprechaun a nice note, reassuring him he didn’t have to worry about us stealing his gold. He was so grateful he left behind a bag of chocolate coins, which are way better than gold anyway.
I’m more worried about what happens when my kid watches Star Wars and finds out Darth Vader is a villain. We visited a friend who owns an actual Vader costume from one of the movies, and so my daughter wouldn’t be scared we said “Don’t worry, he’s a superhero! He’ll keep you safe all night!” So now she sleeps with a little Vader toy on her nightstand. You can tell he’s a bedtime toy, because he “snores”.
My son lost a tooth when we were visiting Montreal. He solemnly informed us, no clue where he got the idea, that the Canadian tooth fairy leaves loonies. Well, what the hell, we put one under his pillow at the hotel, and in the morning he treated us to a nod of satisfaction that proper procedure had been followed.
I’m not sure I ever believed in the tooth fairy- my dad has a slightly evil sense of humour, and worked at a zoo- he kept bringing back random animal teeth, and trying to get me to hide them under my pillow ‘to see how much money I got’.
Have you any idea how hard it is to try and sleep with an elephant molar under your head?
When he picked up on the growing cynicism, he claimed that the tooth fairy was really him. In a tutu. I told my teacher, who thought that was hilarious. I think I was about 5 at the time.
Oh yeah, my mom’s response to questions about the tooth fairy was to admit that yes it was really dad and we should be more considerate when he naps in the afternoon because you’d be tired too if you had to get up every night to handle Dental Loss and Acquisition for the Greater Midwest Area.
A recent episode of This American Life had a discussion where someone’s daughter had been informed by her friend that she (friend) had caught her own dad doing the Tooth Fairy handoff. The logical conclusion the two came to was that said friend’s dad was the Tooth Fairy (as his “night job”?), which the daughter then relayed to her own parents. The parents quickly agreed with this assessment and asked her to not ruin it for anyone else.
