When they ask about the tooth fairy

It’s distracting and discombobulating to have a loose tooth in your mouth (or two, as can sometimes happen), getting wobblier by the day until it’s only being tethered by a fragile thread. I remember that sensation still, so many decades later. Years pass and now it’s your child insistently wobbling a tooth back and forth with their finger. Sooner or later, out it comes, accompanied by a small wash of blood and a brief moment of shock on their face. 

By this point, most parents will have explained to their child why it happens that ‘baby’ or milk teeth are replaced by adult ones, along with the reminder to care for them well, as the new set needs to last a lifetime.  

But what to do with the tooth itself that is now being proudly presented? We could discard it, as we do nail clippings and hair trimmings. More likely, given the child’s pride in it and looking to honour the moment as a stepping stone to adulthood, we will turn to a form of ritual. Many and varied are the rituals around the world associated with losing a baby tooth, from burying, burning or throwing it over the roof.  

There’s no particular Jewish ritual for this lifecycle moment, although on the occasion of the first tooth a child loses, some families might recite shehechiyanu (the blessing that is said when something happens for the first time). In 21st century western culture, by far the most prevalent ritual is for the child to place their tooth carefully under the pillow, accompanied by a polite note to the tooth fairy, and to wake up to find it ‘magically’ gone and replaced by a coin.  

‘Jewish or not Jewish?’, as Lenny Bruce would have asked. 

I didn’t think too much about the cultural appropriateness of this practice when my children were losing their teeth. Somehow the tooth fairy seemed welcome to visit our home, whereas the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus would definitely not be stopping by. I was happy to allow for one form of magical thinking, but not others.  

On face value, the tooth fairy is not as rooted in Christian tradition as the Easter bunny or Santa Claus (although even their links to theology itself are tenuous at best). There’s no reason why the tooth fairy can’t be Jewish and we certainly have a rich pantheon of Jewish spirits who are capable of going from house to house, such as Lilith, a demonic spirit, or Elijah at the seder. 

What is more of an issue is that of truth and where we draw the line about what is in effect lying to our children. Elijah might visit our seder each year; I hope he does and love the idea of his visitations to every Jewish household that night. Creation over seven days, mannah in the desert, the miracle of the oil lasting eight days and many other miracles and wonders have divergent layers of truth to them. But when it comes to the tooth fairy, there can be no doubt that if we go along with it, sneak into our child’s bedroom, stealthily replace the tooth with a coin and then look surprised in the morning, we are perpetuating an outright lie.  

Lying is up there as a serious transgression, the ninth of the ten commandments. White lies can be acceptable in some circumstances. If you’re fostering some magic in your child’s life with a twinkle in your own eye, which one is it? As parents, we safeguard our children’s growing into adulthood with all forms of half or even quarter truths to ensure that what they know and understand is age and stage appropriate.  

At some point, we relent or our kids cotton on. You don’t come across many teenagers who are still convinced in the tooth fairy or care about what the fairy offers by way of currency. If our child is asking us insistently and earnestly about the tooth fairy, then it’s probably time to give up the ruse and be honest. If we insist too much, we back ourselves into a corner and damage the most important quality we are looking to foster in our relationship with our children: trust. 

When there are younger siblings in the house or so as not to spoil things for friends and classmates, we might ask our child to go along with the secret for a while. Indeed, this is the very moment that should be treasured as a stepping stone between childhood and adulthood worthy of a shehechiyanu, for in that conversation, the child steps inside the parental orb and grows internally, able to see an aspect of childhood from a more adult perspective. The moment seldom lasts and kids return to being kids doing their thing and we doing ours, but just as the replacement of baby teeth with adult ones takes place in a series of stages over time, so too do these back and forth moments of adulting.