Apparently, the price of baby teeth has gone up since I was a kid:
Like Manhattan apartments, the value of baby teeth has been skyrocketing lately.
The tooth fairy is paying an average of $3.70 a tooth — a 23 percent rise since last year, and a 42 percent bump from two years ago, says a study Visa released Friday alongside its Tooth Fairy Personal finance app. That means a full set of 20 baby teeth nets an average of $74.
“I think the Tooth Fairy is suffering from irrational exuberance,” said Jason Alderman, director of global financial education at Visa, referencing comments ex-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made about the dotcom boom and bust.
He has a point. Baby teeth values are way out of whack with inflation, which over the last year has risen at a rate of just 2.0 percent. So what’s the deal?
The hike might be driven by good ol’ fashioned guilt, according to Neale Godfrey, chair of the Children’s Financial Network and author of books such as Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Financially Responsible Children.
“I think the amounts have gone up because we feel guilty about our parenting,” Godfrey told the Chicago Tribune. “We are not spending as much time with our children as we would like, and so we substitute money for time.”
When I was a kid, the going price seemed to be about a dollar, which in my particular case was paid out in the form of an Eisenhower Dollar Coin, which was still in general circulation at the time.
