Has The Tooth Fairy helped or harmed humanity?

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...sounds like an irreverent piss-take of Teo's thread but bear me out. 
The Tooth Fairy is just one of the many lies we use to ease the task of parenting because lying to small children is piss-easy, they are such gullible tykes that even the most inept liars among us can pull it off with aplomb ... "Sorry sweetie, that's the tune the ice-cream man plays when he's run out of ice-cream", "go to sleep or the bogie man will get you" (never did understand the logic of that one), "sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you"... 

The Tooth Fairy is a belief system we use to placate young children who have suffered the mild trauma of losing one of their milk-teeth (aka deciduous, primary or baby teeth). On the surface it's a harmless practice of lying to children who are at a very impressionable age and are thus naturally inclined to believe everything their parents tell them, and we reward them for believing in this lie by sneaking into their bedrooms once they are asleep and leaving a silver coin under their pillows in exchange for the aforementioned tooth... The Tooth Fairy is a bit of a win-win because, unlike Santa Claus, there is a fixed cut-off for when this lie has run its course should the child fail to disbelieve in the existence of the Tooth Fairy before all twenty baby teeth have fallen out, for even at a pound, dollar or euro per tooth it's not going to break the bank of mum and dad. Once the existence of [this fairy] has been revealed to be a bit of a fib then this paves the way for other white lies to be painlessly (and harmlessly) discarded, such as Santa and the Easter Bunny, and the child slowly learns the difference between fantasy and reality without losing trust in the parents. Few children grow into teens believing that the Tooth Fairy is real and hopefully no one reaches adulthood still holding onto that belief (otherwise there is going to be one mystified parent and one very unhappy child waking up one morning to discover the lost tooth is still under the pillow). 

Yet no one has to prove that the Tooth Fairy does not exist, no one would argue with a child who has just realised that it doesn't and no one would say that not believing in the Tooth Fairy is a belief system. [... and no one would condemn them to an eternity in the afterlife searching for their lost teeth that the Tooth Fairy failed to collect either.] All adults accept that the Tooth Fairy is not real without the need for proof, we all acknowledge that it is a custom we adopt (that someone else made up) for a perfectly valid reason at a particular stage in a child's physiological development. The same is also true for every other fantastical being that most (if not all) adults do not believe actually ever existed...

/gah, my spelling is atrocious today 

Edited by Dean - February 23 2017 at 03:02