The Tooth Fairy Dishes Out $2.09 Per Tooth -- Katz Orthodontics Reports

Oil’s hit $100 a barrel, gold’s at $1000 an ounce, but the real winner is inside your mouth – or, to be more precise, inside your child’s mouth. Securian Dental’s 2008 Tooth Fairy price poll reveals that per-tooth prices jumped 22% last year to a whopping $2.09 per tooth on average.

What Are Your Child’s Teeth Worth?

Securian reports that $1 is the most common price tag on a lost baby tooth. An online poll of more than 20,000 readers at ParentCenter.com confirms this trend: 52% of respondents report paying a dollar a tooth. In Securian’s survey, $5 per tooth was the second most popular payment. With 20 baby teeth to lose, today’s children are looking at a nice little nest egg.

The Tooth Fairy isn’t terribly consistent, however, as a closer look at recent poll results reveals. She leaves merely a nickel per tooth for some children, and splurges on others, with a few precious teeth going for $50 each! Also, East Coast teeth appear to be the most valuable. New York teeth go for about a dollar more than California teeth, and about a dollar and a quarter more than Midwestern teeth.

Tooth Fairy Economics

With a 22% increase this year, the Tooth Fairy Index outstripped the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, both of which decreased while tooth prices skyrocketed. Despite this year’s surprising jump, the per-tooth price generally reflects the overall health of the economy, according to Securian, which conducts its Tooth Fairy poll annually.

Tooth Fairy expert Rosemary Wells of the Northwestern University School of Dentistry tracked the Tooth Fairy’s generosity extensively, and checked her yearly prices against the Consumer Price Index. She reported that from 1900 through 1980, tooth prices rose steadily in proportion to rates of inflation.

The Tooth Gap and the Generation Gap

Today’s children are faring quite well compared with past generations of tooth-losers. Generation X youngsters, for instance, woke up to mere change. According to Wells’s research, the average value of a tooth in 1980 was 66 cents. Baby Boomers were lucky to see even a quarter – the average tooth in 1955 only returned 19 cents.

So if your gap-toothed second-grader is disappointed when she peeks under her pillow, you can remind her of just how good kids have it these days.

And remember that seven is the best age to come in for an orthodontic consultation, so bring your little ones in to Katz Orthodontics for the best in orthodontic care.