Never have I encountered a more stunning example of psychological conditioning cloaked in harmless fairy tale fun than in the seemingly innocuous example of the tooth fairy myth.

Think about it for a second. The figure of the tooth fairy is a night stalker, an anonymous figure, hardly any different from the boogie man or those strangers we are always telling our children to avoid with such over-zealous insistence. So why is it that parents, a group which has a notorious reputation for telling their children either overtly or tacitly that the world is a dangerous place filled to the brim with potential sources of harm, make an exception in the case of the tooth fairy? Through a careful comparative analysis of the tooth fairy and the boogie man stories any reasonable person, and certainly any child, would conclude that the tooth fairy is not to be feared because the tooth fairy is a potential source of income. By telling our children that the tooth fairy is simply mad about teeth for reasons unknown, and in a position to buy the teeth of any child selling we are indoctrinating our children with several troubling values. The first, and possibly most disturbing, is that one should never question a person’s (or entity’s) motives when money is involved. The second is that there is nothing sacred about one’s own bodily organs – essentially that they can be bought and sold at will. The third thing we tell our children is that when money (or any resource) they do not possess is involved they do not get to dictate or even question the terms of the transaction. By conveying a clandestine consumer exchange where one party has complete anonymity as not only not sinister, but magical, we are communicating some very problematic values indeed and yet the myth shows no sign of waning in its popularity.