Constable: Tooth Fairy payouts outperform stocks

The bronze-medalist of the American consumer's iconic gift-giving characters, the Tooth Fairy often is a child's first introduction to the glories and inequities of capitalism.

Santa Claus, a shopping mall staple, bestows gifts upon children as a reward for good behavior. His less-judgmental religious counterpart, the Easter Bunny, doles out candy eggs, sugary confections and even statues of himself made of chocolate.

The Tooth Fairy, who apparently doesn't give a whit about religious affiliations or conduct, is all business. You leave the fairy a tooth, the fairy will pay you the market price. There is nothing in the rules of the transaction that says it even has to be your tooth.

And the Tooth Fairy had a record year, according to a poll unveiled Monday by the Oak Brook-based Delta Dental Association.

"The Tooth Fairy left $255 million for lost teeth last year. She's a rich lady, that Tooth Fairy," says Darci Shaw, associate director of marketing communications for the not-for-profit national network of independent dental service corporations that has been conducting The Original Tooth Fairy Poll since 1998.

Tooth Fairy payouts generally mirror the stock market, and while the Standard & Poor's 500 index posted an 11.4 percent gain in 2014, Tooth Fairy payouts jumped 24.6 percent.

"The average gift is up to a new high of $4.36," Shaw says of the typical payment left for the tooth of a kid in the United States. The amount paid for a first tooth hit $5.74, a 27-percent increase from 2013. However, as in real estate, tooth prices are all about location.

Getting top dollar from the Tooth Fairy in the suburbs is like pulling teeth. Kids in the Midwest get just $2.83 per tooth, the lowest rate in the nation. The Tooth Fairy shells out $4.68 in the West, $4.16 in the Northeast and a whopping $5.16 per tooth in the South, which might explain that stereotype of good old boys in the South having fewer teeth as adults.

Kids with lawyers might have an age-discrimination case against the Tooth Fairy. The poll shows that the Tooth Fairy leaves just $2.45 on average for the tooth of a child with parents age 45 and older. Kids with parents younger than 35 make $5.40 per tooth.

Deerfield used to be home to a Tooth Fairy museum operated out of the home of Rosemary Wells, who taught scientific writing at Northwestern University Dental School's dental hygiene department and collected data on the legend. She died in 2000, the dental school closed in 2001, and the museum is no more.

But Delta Dental keeps track of Tooth Fairy legends across the globe.

Elves and brownies handle the tooth transactions across much of Europe. In Chile and Costa Rica, moms turn the baby teeth into charms and jewelry for the kids. In many other Spanish-speaking nations, the baby teeth are picked up by a magical mouse. An Argentine animated movie titled "El Raton Pérez" tells the story of the "Hairy Tooth Fairy," a mouse named Pérez who polishes all those children's teeth into pearls, which are then sold to jewelers. American movies featuring the Tooth Fairy include the entertaining "Rise of the Guardians" and the visual root canal titled "The Tooth Fairy," with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a grumpy hockey player in the title role.

Hockey might be a market factor for the Tooth Fairy, however. In Canada, where lots of kids grow up playing the rough sport of hockey, the Tooth Fairy pays $1.12 more per tooth than kids receive in the United States.

All this Tooth Fairy information can be overwhelming at times for parents. Polling shows that the Tooth Fairy "forgets" to visit about a third of the homes on the first night a tooth is left under a pillow. Many times in our household, the Tooth Fairy didn't drop a dime until one of our sons filed an official "failed to deliver" complaint at breakfast. Still, a late payment seems better than a nocturnal rodent visit.