What to Do When Your Kid Writes a Letter to the Tooth Fairy: Parenting Tips for Small Meaningful Moments
Last October, my 7-year-old Mia slid a crumpled, glitter-covered piece of construction paper across the kitchen table at 6:30 pm, one side of her mouth still puffy from the dentist pulling her loose first top tooth that morning. I was mid-fold of a pile of her dad’s work socks, a glue stick cap rolling under my chair, and had already tucked the $5 bill I planned to slip under her pillow into my sweatpants pocket that morning. “This is for the Tooth Fairy,” she said, kicking her legs against the table leg. “She has to write me back. Okay?”
I peeked at the letter, her messy second-grade handwriting slanting across the page, words misspelled in the way that only makes sense to her: Dror Toth Fairee. My tooth hurted. I did not cry even when the dentist pulled it. Can I keep my tooth? I want to put it in my mermaid locket. Also, my brother ate my last popsicle. Can you tell him to stop? P.S. Do you like unicorns?
For half a second, I almost said what a million tired parents would say: The Tooth Fairy is very busy flying all over the world tonight, she doesn’t have time to write back. I had lunches to pack, a load of laundry to pull out of the dryer, and a work email I needed to answer before bed. But I remembered two weeks earlier, Mia had come home from school upset because she’d left a drawing of our cat in her teacher’s mailbox and the teacher hadn’t mentioned it for three days. “No one reads my notes,” she’d said, curled up on my lap after school. So I changed my mind. I smoothed out the crumpled paper and told her I’d make sure the Tooth Fairy got it.
After Mia fell asleep that night, I stood in her doorway, smelling the lavender from her humidifier and listening to our dog snore on the landing, and realized I had nothing fancy to write a reply on. I grabbed a half-sheet of lined paper from the recycling bin— it was the back of a math worksheet Mia had already turned in—and dug through her art jar for a working pen. The only one that wasn’t dried out was a leaky silver glitter pen she’d gotten for her birthday. I didn’t overthink it. I wrote back line by line: Got your letter! You can absolutely keep your tooth—it’s yours, after all. I’ll remind your brother that popsicles have names on them for a reason. And yes, I love unicorns, my favorite is the sparkly pink one. Great job not crying at the dentist—that’s such brave work. Can’t wait to see your next tooth. —The Tooth Fairy. I slipped the note and the $5 under her pillow and went back to my laundry, glitter already sticking to my jeans.
The next morning, Mia came running into the kitchen waving the note like it was a gold medal. She showed her dad, showed her grumpy older brother, taped it right to the front of the fridge next to her first soccer trophy. It’s still there six months later.
That experience got me thinking about how we treat these tiny childhood traditions as just fun, or just a way to get through the awkward loose tooth phase, and we miss what they actually are: low-stakes practice for the skills kids need most. When Mia wrote that letter, she wasn’t just playing a game. She was practicing writing for a real audience, not just for a worksheet grade. She was working up the courage to share a small annoyance that felt huge to her, and she was testing whether someone would actually care about what she had to say. That’s the kind of learning that sticks way longer than a spelling list.
I’ve talked to a lot of parents who panic when their kid asks for a reply from the Tooth Fairy. They think they need custom fairy stationery, perfect handwriting, a clever rhyming message to make it special. But that’s not true, and the pressure to make it perfect makes a lot of people skip it entirely. The only concrete things you actually need to do are small and easy. First, use whatever paper you have. It can be the back of a grocery receipt, a post-it note, a scrap of wrapping paper—your kid won’t care if it’s fancy. Second, answer every specific thing they wrote about, even the silly stuff. If they complain about a sibling stealing their snack, acknowledge that it’s unfair instead of skipping over it. If they ask a question about the Tooth Fairy’s life, answer it. That takes two minutes, max, and it tells them their words matter. Third, if you’re too tired or busy or you just plain forget to reply the first night, leave a short note saying the Tooth Fairy had 200 other teeth to deliver that night and will write back tomorrow. No one’s keeping score, and your kid will be just as excited the next day.
A couple months after that first letter, Mia lost another tooth and wrote again, asking if the Tooth Fairy liked the same mermaid movies she likes. I wrote back that I’d seen The Little Mermaid three times, and the next night Mia left a drawing of a sparkly mermaid under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy. That drawing’s taped right next to the first note now.
Last week, Mia’s 10-year-old brother teased her at dinner that the Tooth Fairy is just me, and Mia just rolled her eyes and said, “You never got a letter because you never wrote one. You only ever asked for $20.” I didn’t say anything. I just kept eating my pasta. The glitter on the first note’s been flaking off for months, and the edges are crumpled from Mia peeling it off the fridge to show friends and taping it back up. We still do this, when she loses another tooth. Some nights I’m tired, I misspell a word, I use whatever scrap of paper I can dig up at 10 pm. It’s messy, it’s not the polished tradition people post about on social media, but it works. Mia’s still writing letters, still getting replies, still learning that when you share what matters to you, someone will answer. I don’t know how much longer she’ll believe in the Tooth Fairy, but for now, this is enough.
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