The Tooth Fairy always stocked up on quarters in our house

Strangely enough (to me anyway), one of the most-read posts in the history of this blog is one from 2013 in which I wrote about the fact that our children never received as much money from the Tooth Fairy as other American kids.

For those scoring along at home – which is to say only me – that post is #2 all-time in blog page views, a distant second to one in which I offered up my top five daddy-daughter songs.

Anyway, I thought about the Tooth Fairy again recently when she was the subject of a New York Times Strands word search.

The rule in our house when our kids were growing up was that, when you lost a tooth, the Tooth Fairy would give you one quarter for every year of age. So if you were 10 years old, you ended up with $2.50 in coins under your pillow the next morning.

This system mostly worked well, though it made quietly placing the coins under the sleeping child's pillow a little trickier than using paper money. There was always the risk of the coins clinking and awakening the little guy/girl.

It never happened, but we came close a couple of times.

I recently asked Google how much kids nowadays receive from the Tooth Fairy. The average amount, according to the good folks at Delta Dental, is $5.84 per lost fang.

A child's first lost tooth commands even more cash, averaging $7.17.

Either way, and even when accounting for inflation, that's more than we ever gave our kids.

Seven bucks = 28 quarters. Good luck slipping that under a pillow without making any noise.

It may simply have been that we were young parents who didn't know any better. Or maybe it was that we had five kids and lacked the disposal income we have now.

Either way, I feel like we owe our children some sort of dental reparations. I'll be sending them each five pounds of quarters to make up for it.