For Heliena, throwing a gender reveal was a turning point in a series of turning points. She had found herself pregnant and single at 20, unexpectedly expecting. 

Heliena moved into her first apartment, held down two jobs, and kept all her doctor’s appointments while also coping with the emotional reality of becoming a parent by herself. “It really marked the ‘I need to care about what happens to me’ point in my life,” she says. It was daunting, and left her with little energy for excitement or anticipation.

After finding out she was having a girl, Heliena told only her stepmother Carolyn, who baked a cake filled with pink candies — “those almost inedibly terrible shiny round chocolate candies,” Carolyn recalls — which they cut open with the immediate family. “It was very sweet. We cried,” Heliena tells me. “And hugs all around,” Carolyn adds.

That small party and the cake full of awful candy was transformative for Heliena. “It took the spotlight away from the logistics and onto [my daughter] as a human being,” she says. With the weight of negative stereotypes about young single mothers worrying Heliena throughout her pregnancy, her gender reveal party reminded her that this was also a time for celebration, and that she had a community to see her through. “It validated everything I was doing to make sure she was going to have a good life, and reassured me that she would have the best family to support and love her.”

Heliena’s pink candy cake is a small part of a massive trend. Over the past decade, gender reveals have spread like wildfire, spawning countless Pinterest boards, think pieces, and a 47,000-acre wildfire. Future parents can choose from endless options for surprising party attendees with a telltale glimpse of pink or blue, from piñatas to candles, and at least one bakery that only makes gender reveal cakes.

The concept of a gender-reveal party feels retro, especially when you consider themes like “Pistols or Pearls?” and “Tiaras or Trucks?” that assign unborn infants not just names or pronouns but entire personalities based on their anatomical sex. However, this is a very modern phenomenon. Announcing the sex of a fetus that has yet to enter the world could only have happened in the era of ultrasound imaging. And the trend never would have taken off without the accelerant of social media, which allows intimate personal moments to be shared with a vast, faceless audience.

The point of a gender reveal is not just to learn something new about a growing but as yet unknowable life — it’s to make a spectacle. Like all kinds of social media challenges, gender reveals are made to be recorded; if you’re going to really go for it, it would be wasteful to confine that viewing experience to those who can be there in person.

Using social media to share a gender reveal can also be a way for long-distance friends and relatives to stay in the loop, to approximate the feeling of community that comes from attending a baby shower or feeling the fetus kick.

“Social media has unleashed an era of disclosure and access transforming the intimate phases of pregnancy into public knowledge; the gender-reveal marks one of the more pivotal points in this public process,” writes Carly Gieseler, an assistant professor of gender and communications at York College, in an article for the Journal of Gender Studies. By sharing moments like this, parents-to-be invite others along for their journeys — and, in some cases, attain material as well as emotional support.

Kimberly Jolasun found a way to turn far-flung loved ones’ curiosity about her pregnancy to her advantage. Her husband’s relatives were convinced she was having a boy. She began allowing family members to place bets on the sex of her fetus for $20. After bringing in $800 from her friends and family, Kimberly placed all the correct guesses in a hat at her baby shower and drew a random winner to receive a Fitbit. She passed on the idea to two of her friends, who both raised several hundred dollars. “I knew then that I was onto something,” Kimberly says.

With her infant son in tow (yes, her husband’s family was right), Kimberly set to work creating the Gender Reveal Game, where future parents create betting pools for the sex of their future offspring and raffle off prizes to those who guess correctly. Kimberly launched her website in May of this year, and has had over 400 games created so far. The Gender Reveal Game has become Kimberly’s full-time job: the site is free for parents to sign up, but the company takes a cut of the funds raised.

As pregnant people go to more and more dramatic lengths to share what’s happening inside their bodies, retailers are finding ways to capitalize. “The gender-reveal trend commoditizes a major event in parenthood and feeds several capital interests that might never have been involved with this stage of parenting,” Gieseler writes.

Gender reveals are a thriving commodity, with parents spending major cash to announce the news via skydiving, at minor league baseball games, or via customized sneakers. “Future moms and dads increasingly feel social pressure to participate and outdo their peers or risk coming across as subpar parents before their child is even born,” writes Diane Stopyra for Marie Claire.

There’s a clear connection between the gender reveal arms race and other forms of intensive parenting. Like Pinterest-perfect birthday parties and toddler music camps, dramatic gender reveals require lots of resources — time, money, or both — making them a subtle way to impose class restrictions on who can be a good (prospective) parent. 

This isn’t the only way that gender reveal parties are intensely divisive; if they reveal anything, perhaps it’s how polarized Americans have become on the topic of gender. The decade in which the gender reveal rose to prominence also saw a massive increase in visibility and protections for trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary Americans — followed, perhaps inevitably, by vicious social and legislative backlash.

The truth is, of course, that you can’t see gender on an anatomy scan. “Gender is the social, behavioral, and psychological characteristics that we use to distinguish the sexes,” writes Daniel L. Carlson for Psychology Today. “By definition, parents have no idea what the gender of their child will be since they have yet to interact with the child.”

Biological sex and gender identity are not perfectly correlated, and for those who have fought to break down the rigid adherence to binary stereotypes, seeing them resurface as a way of categorizing people not yet born is frankly painful. “Gendered binaries support patriarchal and hegemonic interests and institutions,” Gieseler writes; “therefore, the foetus is thrust into the hegemony via language and ritual as the pregnant woman is subsumed in the province of patriarchal control.”

It’s tempting to see the pink/blue dichotomy as old-fashioned and not long for this world, but it’s millennials and Gen Z-ers who are jeopardizing acres of forest and countless parental skulls with binary-reifying publicity stunts. If younger generations are not only embracing old ways of performing gender but creating hugely popular new ones, that’s worrisome to anyone who envisions society moving toward a future free of biological essentialism.

In fact, Jenna Karvunidis, the mother whose gender reveal party was the first to go viral in 2008, recently posted on Facebook that she thinks the trend has gotten “crazy.” “I just wish people would calm down with their reveal parties,” Karvunidis tells me. “People need to stop blowing things up for internet likes and focus on loving and accepting their kids.”

But there’s something other than a longing for good old-fashioned patriarchy at work in the ever-growing prevalence of this trend, something that appeals even to people who don’t want to shore up the gender binary.

Heliena doesn’t feel that she parents her daughter, now almost a year and a half, differently than she would have an assigned-male child. “If I had a boy, I would shamelessly put him in pink and purple,” she says, and she acknowledges that her child may not always identify as a girl. Julia Pelly writes for Motherly that she rejects the sex-role stereotyping of “Bows or Bow Ties?” but still felt the appeal of a gender reveal party and “spent hours looking everywhere I could think of online for a non-sexist idea.” 

A paper by Florence Pasche Guignard asserts that the gender reveal became a phenomenon “in a context where neither medical nor religious institutions offer ritual options deemed appropriate enough for celebrating joyfully and emotionally during pregnancy.” Expectant parents are trying to meet an emotional need that might otherwise go unrecognized, and as imperfect as it is, a gender reveal party offers at least an approximation of what many parents are searching for.

Parents Joanna and Isaac came upon a possible solution while Joanna was pregnant with their second child. “Gender isn’t something we can assign to our child ourselves and isn’t a strict binary blue/pink thing,” Joanna tells me, but they still liked the idea of doing something to celebrate their impending newborn. “Our friend Marci suggested a chromosome reveal party instead.”

With the help of cookie cutters and a freezer, Marci created two loaf-shaped cakes, one lemon-flavored (Joanna’s favorite) and one chocolate peanut butter (Isaac’s). When sliced, the cakes’ cross sections revealed an X and Y in contrasting colors—gender-neutral green, yellow, and brown. The cake was served at a small party for friends and family, and video of the event has not, as of yet, gone viral. “It was perfect,” Joanna says.

Gieseler tells me in an email that this is one of the ways she sees the gender reveal evolving in recent years. While some parents continue to raise the stakes with elaborate and even dangerous pink-or-blue spectacles, others are choosing intimacy and complexity.

“I’ve noted celebrations that reject the pink-and-blue themes entirely, instead surprising guests with a ‘non-reveal’ or a multi-colored take representing the multiplicity of gendered identity,” she says. “Obviously, no one should feel restricted in celebrating this wonderful, hopeful time, yet there are ways to be creative, subversive, and critically enlightened within this popular trend.”

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When Lydia’s daughter began losing her baby teeth, Lydia decided that instead of dollar bills, she’d leave gold dollar coins under her pillow — three coins per tooth. That seemed like a touch of tooth fairy whimsy that wouldn’t be too much work. But after a few years of this tradition, when her daughter got a loose tooth at Disneyland, Lydia panicked. Their family was staying on the resort; it was after banking hours. “We asked every vendor, shopkeeper, and hotel desk person at the place if they had even one of those gold coins,” Lydia recalls, “and the answer across the board was no.”

Fortunately, the loose tooth dangled until the family got home and the tooth fairy could run to the bank. But for a few hours, Lydia was afraid a currency mix-up might give the game away.

Lydia’s level of commitment is impressive, but not out of the ordinary. American parents put a lot of time, effort, and, of course, money into convincing children the Tooth Fairy is real. In 1998, Delta Dental, the largest dental insurer in the US, began conducting an annual nationwide poll to determine how much money children received from the tooth fairy. The first year of the poll recorded the average per-tooth compensation at $1.30. This year, the Original Tooth Fairy Poll, conducted by Kelton Global on behalf of Delta Dental, collected data from a nationally representative sample of 1,058. The results indicated that the tooth fairy leaves an average of $3.70 per tooth in the US, declining for the second year in a row after peaking above $4.50 in 2017.

Although the price of a tooth has risen faster than inflation since 1998, the average under-the-pillow payout is a fairly reliable indicator of the S&P 500, the index most financial experts use to track the health of the US economy and stock market. NPR’s Planet Money theorizes that the increase in tooth price over inflation is because when funds are more available, spending tends to increase disproportionately in the areas that people value most, such as creating treasured memories for one’s children.

Delta doesn’t track which parent in two-parent households is most often responsible for tooth compensation, but it seems reasonable to assume that, like most of the mental work — noticing, remembering, planning — of parenting, this job is disproportionately handled by mothers. When I asked around for tooth-related anecdotes, almost everyone who responded was a woman. And while Delta reports that the tooth fairy tradition is a source of joy in more than half the families surveyed, many parents say it’s also a source of stress — not just the cumulative financial investment but also the pressure to create magical childhood memories overnight, again and again.

How did the tooth fairy tradition begin?

Although cultures around the world have traditions for marking a child’s lost tooth, the tooth fairy is a relatively recent and specifically American myth. Various peoples from Asia to Central America have a practice of leaving a lost tooth as an offering for some kind of animal in exchange for a healthy new one. Historians believe the American tooth fairy may have been inspired by this tradition, combined with European folklore about good fairies giving gifts or granting wishes.

While the earliest written reference to the tooth fairy is from a children’s play of the same name in 1927, the character didn’t achieve ubiquity until the mid-20th century, assisted, according to folklorist Tad Tuleja, by a thriving economy, a renewed romanticization of childhood, and the popularity of good fairies in the media (such as Disney movies).

The Tooth Fairy Poll indicates that in many families, the first tooth a child loses is a cause for special celebration and special remuneration; the average payout for that tooth is $4.96. But for some parents, going to great lengths to celebrate the milestone loss creates expectations that may be difficult to meet in the future.

The tooth fairy doesn’t require as much elaborate setup as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but she’s a much more frequent visitor, at least during the years between ages 6 and 12, when baby teeth are lost and adult teeth grow in. Parenting expert Susan Newman, author of Little Things Long Remembered, says that traditions like the tooth fairy can contribute to the lasting strength of a parent-child bond. “What you’re doing is building a child’s memory bank with warm recollections of growing up,” she explains.

But she also cautions against getting too caught up in the social media-fueled rush to go over the top at all times: “My main message to parents is whatever expectations you have, lower them.” Parents can have fun being creative with their tooth fairy routines, but the self-imposed pressure to go above and beyond the classic dollar under the pillow is part of a larger pattern of overwhelming parenting expectations. The impetus to curate a perfect, magical childhood (with the corresponding “or else” implied) means that parents are always striving to outdo each other or themselves, with no room to relax.

For parents of more than one child, the tooth fairy years can stretch on interminably, but even only children can demand a lot of energy. It can be a short journey from children losing teeth to parents losing their grip.

Gina, whose daughter is now in college, remembers, “I really screwed myself by writing a note from the tooth fairy the first time.” Delta Dental encourages this tradition, even providing a template tooth fairy letter with reminders to brush regularly and avoid sugar. But what seems like a cute, magical touch on the first tooth can become onerous by the fourth — or 14th. “It was the bane of our existence,” says Gina. “My daughter never forgot!”

Katrina gives her 6- and 8-year-olds an almost retro dollar per tooth, but she origamis the dollar bills into different shapes each time, like a rabbit when her eldest lost a tooth close to Easter. Her kids love it, and remember specific dollar animals long after the tooth fairy has come and gone, but she sometimes wishes she hadn’t yoked herself to such a labor-intensive tradition — especially “at 10 pm as I’m wrestling with a crummy dollar,” she says. Still, Katrina plans to continue the origami art for her youngest child, now 3.

When Risa’s son lost a tooth on a family trip to Maine, she forgot about the tooth fairy in all the extra demands of traveling. She explained the missed pickup with an improvised story about Maine’s local tooth collector, the “tooth lobster,” adding that “because he lost his tooth so late in the day, the tooth fairy hadn’t had a chance to let the tooth lobster know that we were in town.” The next night she replaced his tooth with the appropriate payment, along with a note from the lobster and a sprinkling of seaweed.

What’s the point of the tooth fairy?

The tooth fairy has grown from a character in a minor, otherwise forgotten play to a nationwide mascot of childhood delight as well as dental health. But why? What does the tooth fairy want with our children’s teeth, and what do we want with her?

Baby teeth are a unique commodity in that supply and demand are always, somehow, perfectly balanced; the tooth fairy buys exactly as many as are available. Parents have come up with all sorts of explanations over the years for what she does with them. As you might expect from a children’s story about deciduous body parts, these accounts are a strange mix of whimsical and grotesque.

Some parents (and dentists) use the tooth fairy to encourage good dental habits in children. A common addition to the mythology is that the fairy only wants teeth in excellent condition, and pays out less for teeth with cavities, although I’ve yet to hear of her actually rejecting any teeth. (Some parents also tell children the tooth fairy can’t navigate a messy room to deliver her payment.) Delta Dental’s version of the character is along these lines, reminding children that “I only use the cleanest, healthiest teeth to build my pearly white palace.”

In addition to building materials, some homespun stories have the fairy using discarded teeth for piano keys, or placing them in the mouths of newborn babies. Others say the fairy needs the teeth for scientific research — and indeed, scientists at Washington University asked children to send in their lost baby teeth throughout the 1960s for a study on strontium-90 levels and cancer risks. Participants received a button announcing “I Gave My Tooth to Science.”

Tuleja suggested that the tooth fairy’s purpose is to teach children about “monetization and the free market,” but she may address a deeper need as well. Losing baby teeth can be stressful, the formerly strong and dependable body part becoming unstable and then falling out altogether. Rosemary Wells, the founder and curator of the now-defunct Tooth Fairy Museum, thought that belief in a magical being who needed those teeth for her own puckish reasons served to comfort children.

Of course, not all kids find the idea of a tooth-collecting pixie endearing. Rachel’s daughters write notes to the tooth fairy asking her to leave their teeth behind, along with the coin she gives them. “They usually keep them in a little special box,” says Rachel, “but I have found them in various places around the house.”

Some families are abandoning the tooth fairy altogether

In the era of intensive parenting, parents have to let some things fall by the wayside for the sake of their own sanity. Some families, whether out of financial strictures or simple lack of interest, are giving up the tooth fairy tradition or not introducing it at all.

Emily had difficulty remembering to leave payments, and it didn’t help that she was pregnant — and nauseated — at the same time her oldest child began losing teeth. “Even when my kid was just wiggling her tooth, it made me want to throw up,” she says. “I finally gave up.” Emily’s youngest is now approaching the age of tooth loss, and Emily says she probably won’t do the tooth fairy with her at all.

Sara’s son had to have his two front teeth pulled when he was 4 years old. “It was kind of nasty and traumatic for us, so the tooth fairy didn’t even enter my mind,” she says. After that experience, ceremonializing future lost teeth seemed unnecessary.

Holly marked her 7-year-old son’s first lost tooth with an outing to the beach, and she plans to let him choose small treats or family activities for future teeth. “It’s a family celebration of a milestone, which feels more natural to me,” she says.

Still, as much stress and frustration as the tooth fairy can cause, many families continue working hard to keep the belief alive. Today, you can even download apps that add the fairy to photographs as proof for skeptical children, or call her and leave a voicemail. If Tad Tuleja was right that the tooth fairy exists to teach kids about capitalism, there are plenty of adults learning from her example as well. But monetizing childhood magic isn’t all the fairy does. Parents don’t have to go completely over the top to create unique tooth fairy memories for their children.

Meredith forgot to switch her daughter’s teeth for money on more than one occasion, but instead of confessing the sprite was a myth, she told her that their tooth fairy was an underperformer at work.

“I would have to pretend to be disappointed and tell her that I would email the tooth fairy’s supervisor,” she remembers. “After it happened a couple of times, she would just say, ‘Mom, you need to email them again about the tooth fairy.’”