White Lies and the Tooth Fairy

Last week, my nanny was at the park with my children and sent me a gorgeous photo she had taken on her smartphone … my youngest had lost the second of her two front teeth and was grinning at the camera, looking like a pirate!
 
So, what do you do for little people who lose teeth … and believe in fairies?
 
Do I go the Brad / Angelina route and leave an educational game for my little one? (Although rumours say that wasn’t well received by little Shiloh!). So, should I really place a coin under my daughter’s pillow, left by a tricksy little Tinkerbell or Flower Fairy?
 
I think I should. And here, to my eternal shame and embarrassment is why.
 
A couple of years ago, I was overtaken by a fad of being “honest” with my children. Yes, really, what could have got into me? Questions were being asked about where babies came from, did the Victorians really use child labour and was Robin Hood real? As a pragmatic personality-type, this was the moment, I thought, that I needed to raise sane and rational beings, not believers in fairy tales. If not, I reasoned, how were they to understand the world, in all its complexity, if I let them carry on believing in ghosts at Hallowe’en, the tooth fairy at wobbly tooth time and Father Christmas at Christmas.
 
Yes, you read that correctly, Father Christmas.
 
So I told them the truth. Well, my older one only as the youngest was just not interested in the conversation. Rightly so. My son is a laid-back personality and appeared to take it in his stride. I got a quizzical look when I sat him down after school one day after another of the “Where do babies come from?” questions and gave him the honest, textbook (chicken and egg variety) answer, then proceeded to spill the beans on the man in the red jumpsuit with the white beard and the so-called tooth fairy. The quizzical look was not followed by tears or further questions. Job done, I thought. Top marks for early education and making my son a sane and rational being.
 
The first indication that I had done something wrong was at the weekend, when my husband firmly closed the kitchen door behind him, and hissed – “What on earth have you been telling G.?” Misunderstanding, I breezily answered – “Oh the birds and the bees stuff?” Men, always so slow with this educational business, I thought to myself – “No!” came the answer – “Not that stuff! Father Christmas! How could you have told him that he wasn’t real?!” Oh dear.
 
There followed a lecture from my sane, rational husband that Children Were Children and they needed fairy tales, myths and legends to understand their place in the world – that you could trust some people but not everyone, that they were loved by their parents, and the world kept childhood sacred, so a nice man came by every Christmas with a sack full of presents … and that wobbly teeth, a sign of growing up, were rewarded with little gold coins to sweeten the anxiety of getting older.
 
It was quite hard to get my son to believe in Father Christmas again … but I did. I’ll tell you that story another time … but I am not making the same mistake with the little one. I paid her £1.00!