Wow. How timely. Just last night DD6 cornered me on the issue of the tooth fairy. She said, "Tell me the truth." She said her cousin had told her there was none and that his mom had shown him a booklet full of his old teeth (ratcheting up the SIL several levels of creepy). Honestly, I couldn't stop chuckling, so that might have been enough answer right there. But I asked her, "What do you think?", and she decided the tooth fairy was real. Then I changed the subject.
This came maybe a week after she had confronted me on Santa (but not with "Tell me the truth" earnestness), saying she'd heard it from her friends, one of whom is 10. On that occasion, I told her a bald-faced lie.
DW and I talked about it last night after the tooth fairy conversation, and we've decided to break the news to her. She looks to us as her reference for what's what, and I don't want to lose that trust. DW is also worried that she's having arguments with her friends about this stuff that will make her feel foolish later.
But I'm also confident that DD doesn't really want to know. I've always told her "There is no magic, only tricks." And time and again when she has questioned the nature of Santa, and I explained it away as magic, I could see her confronting the two conflicting pieces of information, and I was totally prepared to hear her blurt out her disbelief. But when that moment of decision arrived, after several minutes of Q&A, and the conflict was written on her face, she'd abruptly change the subject. She's perfectly happy to accept a little cognitive dissonance for the magic of Santa.
Last edited by Dude; 11/30/11 08:00 AM.
