My granddaughter has me thinking about the changing economics of the Tooth Fairy

The ear-to-ear grin on my phone screen said it all. My third-grade granddaughter had lost yet another tooth, and she was giddy with the accomplishment. She had been poking and prodding that pearly white with her tongue for weeks. Finally, effort and persistence had paid off.

This was no small feat. For more than a year, the child had watched cousins and classmates display their jack-o-lantern smiles while her teeth stayed firmly, stubbornly in place. No amount of staring in the mirror changed the geography of her mouth, and at times, the thought of missing out — on gummy smiles and Tooth Fairy generosity — felt like undeserved punishment.

But at some point, one tooth loosened and eventually surrendered space. It was followed by another. And another. At last, she had the look she had aspired to: a mouth under construction. Something else too: money.

“Did the Tooth Fairy visit?” I asked.

“Yes!” she shrieked. ‘I got five bucks!”

I slipped into shocked silence, but she was too busy prancing around the room to notice. “I’m rich! I’m rich! I’m rich!” she chanted.

She certainly was — $5 for a baby tooth! What happened to the George Washington bill or the fancy silver dollar under the pillow? I consider myself a with-it abuela, but $5 seemed a bit much.

Apparently, it’s not. I checked. My granddaughter’s payout, though on the high side, falls within the range of cash gifts dropped off by the Tooth Fairy in homes around the country.

Earlier this year, the annual Original Tooth Fairy Poll revealed that the Fairy’s average cash gift had just climbed to $4.70, its highest point in the poll’s 23-year history. It topped the 2017 previous high by 4 cents. These under-the-pillow rewards vary according to region, of course, with baby teeth worth less in the Midwest ($3.66), and the most in the North ($5.72) and the West ($5.54). I couldn’t find an explanation for the variation, but suspect it may have something to do with the cost of living.

Back in 1998, when Delta Dental Plans began looking at the Tooth Fairy’s gift-giving, a lost tooth was worth $1.30. Do the math, and you realize the value of that little piece of dentin and enamel has more than tripled since then. I’m fairly sure parents’ income hasn’t kept up with that vertiginous climb.

My investigation into Tooth Fairy payouts coincided with alarming news from the real world, where no adult ever finds cash under the pillow and most people I know pay a pretty penny to keep their teeth in place. I most certainly do.

At any rate, just last week news reports confirmed what every shopper has faced when buying anything from eggs to gas. Consumer prices in the U.S. jumped 6.2% from a year ago in October. It was the steepest surge since December 1990. If you subtracted food and energy from the equation, “core inflation” increased by 4.6%, the fastest since August 1991. To add insult to injury, the Labor Department reported that real wages after inflation fell 0.5% from September to October.

Taking all this numerical mumbo-jumbo into account, I figured my granddaughter’s hefty haul was a result of market forces. The dollar her father had received for his teeth back in the day was nearly worthless in today’s toy store. Hence, the need to jack up compensation.

Nevertheless, I brought up the matter of the Tooth Fairy’s largesse with my son. Though on some level I understood the need to increase the payout, I was curious about how the parents had arrived at that sizable sum.

“Our inflation was based on not having dollar bills,” he texted back. “Supply chain disruptions.”

His wife added that the Tooth Fairy “needs to get with the times and use Venmo.”

Oh, the real-world application of economics.