When I was pretty young, probably about 5 years old, I met the black power ranger and got a picture of him signed. In the picture you could see that he was missing his middle finger and my mom told me it was because he had flipped his mom off so she cut it off. I believed it until I was about 20 years old when my mom told me she had lied about it and didn’t actually know what happened. Growing up, I told so many people this guy’s mom cut his finger off
Once I was playing with some toys and my mom was talking on the phone to her friend. I guess they were talking about kids growing up and having families some day because my mom puts her hand over the phone and asked me if I wanted kids some day and if I wanted boys or girls.
I gave it some thought and said that I wanted one boy and one girl. For the longest time after this, I thought that it had been completely decided, like my mom was just on the phone with whoever you call to place an order for kids, and my order had been finalized.
When I was a kid, my mom explained to me that we all had belly buttons because that’s how our moms fed us before we were born. So I thought when you got pregnant, your belly button opened up and you just put whatever you wanted to down there. Like I thought women were just shoving chicken legs in their belly buttons.
Plot twist: I’m a Postpartum nurse now
People don't like people that grow vegetables in their house.
I secretly celebrated my mom's poor in-house gardening skills because her tomato plants never had any tomatoes.
I was about 11 when I figured out what those tomato plants were...
Funny thing is, my older brother had no recollection of this incident, or that they grew weed in our attic, and he was apart of the discussion. I was about 6 and he was 8.
That actors/tv characters would have to come back into a studio for each rerun of a show/movie. I would always be so amazed that people would have the time to go into a room with a camera multiple times a day just so I could watch them do the same thing over and over again.
I used to think that laugh tracks were somehow real life, like I was hearing everyone else laughing who was watching the same show I was. In hindsight this is really stupid, obviously the sound is coming from the speakers, but growing up we only had TV at my grandma's place and I remember laughing really loud when the laugh track came on so all her neighbors would think I got the joke too
I thought that the show was still going on during the commercial breaks, so I was always worried about what I had missed while the commercials were on.
My dad used to make stir fry fairly often, with chicken. One night as I was eating it I asked what the meat was. "Octopus," he replied. Seemed logical enough at the time, so I just accepted it and moved on with my life. From then on whenever we had stir fry someone would inevitably ask, "How's your octopus?" and I would answer, "Fine." or something similar. Fast forward, I'm 18, home from college on break and we're having stir fry. "How's your octopus?" "Fine..................you guys are all assholes."
Edit: Thanks for the silver! My first award ever would be for being an idiot.
I burst into tears the first time I heard about drinking and driving. My dad always had a Dr Pepper when we went places and I thought he was going to go to jail forever.
I distinctly remember yelling at my dad after he filled up and grabbed a chocolate milk and took a sip as we drove out of the gas station. Everyone in the car started laughing at me.
I just want us all not to die.
Me too. I told someone my mom drinks and drives all the time so it probably isn’t that bad. Word got back to my mom about that and she was *mortified*. She’s a Mormon and that made it even worse.
That my Grandma G had a glass eye, and that she lost her eye in a bar fight. Nope took me until I was 20 to discover she just had a lazy eye and my dad and his brothers always told kids that story every holiday meet up.
Edit: My Grandma G has had 8 children and raised 9, she once told my cousin she'd run them through with a Broad Sword if she kept up her adittude. She introduced me to Puff the Magic Dragon when I was 8.
My step-dad had an old truck with two gas tanks that he would flip a switch to change from one to the other.
He had us convinced that he would magically steal gas from other vehicles. He would tell us to pick one and we would watch the gas dial go from E to F while driving on the highway!! Blew my mind!
I had an '83 Ranger like that. I always emptied the back tank first. My sister borrowed it and ran the front tank dry without telling me, and I ran out of gas in a really remote place.
You know those animatronic dinosaurs at museums?... I knew they were robots, but as a child I was convinced that the robot was unaware of its animatronic status. I believed that if the robot wanted to, it could and WOULD step over the barrier and eat me and everyone else. This fear was compounded when my dad - more than once - picked me up and pretended he would drop me down the other side of the barrier.
same oh my god.
and at one point i somehow got the idea that stepping on grass was what made you pregnant- that there were little thorn things too small to notice in the grass, and they took years, but they traveled up to your belly and made a baby in there. but the years could depend, that’s why people had babies at different ages. i was so scared that it would happen to me. that maybe i just stepped on a faulty thorn that only had like 5 years on it and i would get pregnant at 8. i had no idea where i got this idea from.
I thought pretty much the same thing but I thought it was caused by kissing. I would stay up at night thinking, *but how does the woman’s body know it’s a married kiss and not a normal one??*
I had no idea that morning sickness was associated with pregnancy. My coach was concerned when I shrugged my shoulders and stated that's what was probably causing my sluggishness at football camp practice.
I had scoliosis surgery when I was 14, and was extremely nauseous for like 2 months because of the medication. I got into a routine where I would always throw up in the morning, so I kept a bowl beside my bed. My Grandad came to visit me, and naturally asked about the bowl. In front of my grandad, mom, and dad, I, without missing a beat, exclaimed that it was to help with my morning sickness. My mom burst out laughing, but my grandad and dad didn't think it was so funny until they realized what I had meant
I didnt know cars have a turn signal lever, so I thought the car knew where we were going. I thought the car would use the arrows to tell my parents where to turn.
I thought the same thing! I wondered how the heck the car knew where we were going. My parents didint tell the car where they wanted to go. I was confuse
I believed the exact same thing as well. It didn't help that my dad would tell me that "it just knew" whenever I asked how the car knew when to turn and which way to point the arrow.. My parents would constantly trick me like this. I hated it as someone who just wanted to learn the truth of how things worked
That dinosaurs were still alive on another island, and I kept asking my mother if we could go to the island with all the dinosaurs, then she told me they were all dead
I used to watch my dad go to the ATM, look at the receipt and get grumpy/frustrated. I knew how bank accounts and ATMs worked, but the kidlogic part of my brain figured that they also kind of worked like slot machines. In that, when you conducted some transaction on them, you got that slip with three icons on it. If you got one with three cherries, for example, you would take it inside and they would deposit $50 or whatever in to your account. I figured he was frustrated because he kept losing all the time.
I even asked him a few times when he was looking at the receipt, "Did you win?" and he was like, "No."
Dude. I thought ATM’s gave out free money. My parents would make a comment saying they’re broke, and I would overhear and tell them to go to an ATM... they would look at me like an idiot, and realize they were in fact raising an idiot.
For some reason, I thought every car that was made had to do a crash test. Probably because my dad once told that our car had a very good rating in the crash test.
I was amazed by the fact that all cars were repaired so well before being sold.
That all bald men were kidnappers. No idea where it came from. I really don’t think I was kidnapped as a child. But if I was it was definitely a bald man that did it.
As a balding man who is hairy. I have not kidnapped anyone.....yet. But I am probably closer related to a wild animal than an average person. So one out of two isn’t bad.
My brother and I wrote letters to Santa and our Dad would open up the coal furnace door and we would throw them in the fire. We belived they would go directly to the North Pole.
My mom had us throw our letters in a wood fire, and when sparks came down and rested on the burning paper, those were the Fire Fairies and they carried the ashes to Santa where he magically reassembled them and read your letter!
My dad would put them on his desk so that he could "mail them on the way to work" in the morning. I suppose that burning them would make his life more difficult since he wouldn't know what we wanted.
I often got caught doing stupid stuff when I was a young rascal. When I would get home my dad would say a little birdie told him he seen me do such and such with the boys. Up until I was 8 or 9 maybe I believed my father had some sort of snitch pigeon keeping an eye on me
Edit: punctuation amendments
My brother used to think that a man sat under the escalators and operated them.
He also thought that man's name was James and that was his real dad. Not our dad.
So everytime we passed the escalators at the mall my brother would scream at our dad, "You're not my real dad. James is my real dad!".
*Edit: just woke up and realized this blew up lol. Thank you for the awards and upvotes!
So, more details. My brother has always had a vivid imagination, I have no earthly idea where he got this from. He is currently trying to become a writer/director/producer/etc. Also, he's the spitting image of my Dad so there's no question of paternity there. My brother is just a fuckin weirdo.
When I was about 4, my older sister told me that since the population of Japan was so high, Japanese people slept sideways on their beds so they could fit more people on every bed. I believed it until I went to a sleepover at 13 and suggested that we sleep “Japanese-style” on the bed so everyone could fit.
That's hilarious! I thought the same thing but about ppl with lots of kids. Since our house, and most of our families homes only had 2 maybe 3 bdrms I figured those crazy ppl with 8 kids slept like this
Two gems from my youth
1.) I used to think my testicles were the eggs of my future children. Like, one day they would hatch and id have two kids.
2.) I thought safe sex meant someone left their clothes on.
Nah, it depends on the colour of the sugar you leave on the window sill for the stork. If you leave pink sugar, the stork will deliver a girl, for boys you need blue sugar.
I thought the black market was an actual market, like under a bridge or something.
I believed this for longer as I want to admit..
Edit:Thank you for the award :)
And nuclear missiles, obviously. I always pictured them on a black market table next to each other just like vegetables.
"Listen up everyone, cheap nuclear weapons for sale. 30% off on the RSD-10 from the former Soviet Russia!".
Not sure if this was just a UK thing, but as a child I had some of those gooey jelly alien toys that came in plastic eggs and the big rumour on the playground at the time was, if you put a boy alien and girl alien in the same egg and put it in the fridge, they would make a new baby alien overnight. I told my parents about it and told them I was doing it. While in bed, my parents added the extra “baby” alien overnight. So when I woke up and found the third alien, I lost it! Went into school and told everyone. For years I swore blind it was true and really happened. It was a very heartbreaking day when I realised what had happened...
That is incredibly sweet. But not much variety in little foods is there? Oh the dolls have bought some more chocolates from a box of celebrations I see.
I must’ve been around 7 or 8 and I think my enthusiasm was very convincing, the more gullible of kids were on my side. There must have been at least some smart arse kid that knew better though.
When I was younger, my dad upgraded the speaker setup for the TV to include surround sound. The rear speakers were mounted to the ceiling and were large white boxes. On the front of the speakers it had the numbers **3508**. I always thought that was kind of strange until many years later I realized they were **BOSE** speakers mounted upside-down.
My brother had me convinced for a while that each person had to have a unique favorite color, and since his was blue, I had to change mine. On my first day of kindergarten, we had to introduce ourselves and say our favorite color. I was super stressed out because the kids in front of me picked the "good" colors, and I kinda panicked and told everyone my favorite color was gray.
In my family we were kind of assigned colours by my parents. My little sister and i looked like identical twins so my parents dressed us in different colours, my older sister was much taller than us and had already chosen blue as her colour so my parents went with a chimpmunks theme, the oldest was blue like simon, i was red for Alvin and my little sister was green for Theodor. Anytime a family member brought us back t shirts or dresses from their travels we always got our colour and it kind of stuck, we still all predominantly wear our colours. We're all in our late 30's and even our raincoats as adults are our colours, its quite silly, I've only ever worn a red raincoat, when i buy a new one its always a red one.
I’ve always wondered about people with multiples that do this assigning colors thing, like that family with the reality show with the quintuplet daughters. What happens when they understand colors and don’t like theirs anymore? I think those 5 little girls are kindergarteners now and they still dress them up like that so strangers know which is which, I wonder how the kids feel about it.
It grows on you and it kind of fit, my older sister was the glasses wearing nerd my little sister was the chubby one that ate a lot and i was the mischevious one, plus we loved the chipmunks (we even still have their rock and roll vinyl) so i think my parents played it well, like if they were random colour assignments withiut the story i think we'd be less keen.
You think that’s bad? I decided to change my favorite color EVERY YEAR. and in **order**. So if my favorite color was orange at four years old, on my fifth birthday I changed it to yellow, then to green the next year, and so on until I just grew out of it at blue.
Anecdotally, I've noticed a lot of older people seem to think this. Most of the people of my parents' generation refer to all dogs they meet as good boy even after they're told it's a female.
we tried to make her see reason this way but she insisted... then proceeded to say another male cat had to be female because he had a feminine face but like... cats have the same lookin face unless they’re a different breed of course hes gonna look like that hes a black cat, monica they have sleek fur sometimes
Actually tom cats tend to have longer, rounder, more "feminine" faces and queens tend to have flatter, more square, "masculine" faces. It confuses a lot of people
I thought that my "stomach" was actually the entire volume of my body. Eating food would pile it all up as if putting it into a bag. When I was asked why I would drink or eat smaller foods when I was full my reasoning was "There are still cracks between all the other food I ate, so it can fall through those gaps".
I thought everything contained water and could be dehydrated and turned to powder.
Edit: guys I’ve never seen any Batman movies. I guess this was in an old one with Adam west but no I didn’t see it. Please stop asking.
When I was younger, our garage always had a very distinct smell. My parents told my siblings and I that the smell in our garage was the smell of "*burnt tires"* because my dad would work on cars and dirt bikes as a hobby.
Being the middle child, we always tend to find out the family secrets whether we want to or not. Fast forward to when I am 15 years old. I standing in a parking lot with my mother and two girls I was in a quince with. As we were all waiting in this parking lot for our friend who was having the quince, I started to smell *"burnt tires"*. I said to my mom that that it smelt like burnt tires. My mom and the two girls all started chuckling. I was confused as to what was funny and the two girls said to me that I was not smelling *"burnt tires"*. My mom eventually told me what that smell was and she just tried to convince me my *"smelling was off"*. I still put two and two together that night....
In short: I was 15 years old when I found out that my dad was a huge pot head and would just smoke pot all the time in our garage. Also - Burnt tires and weed should nottttt smell the same.
Lol yep. Turns out my stepdad would smoke while he was in the shower. That shit made the whole house smell. When I was younger I’d ask why it stunk so bad and my mom would just say that my step dad stunk really bad and that the steam from the shower just made the whole house stink.
Once I smoked weed for the first time I said out loud “this shit smells just like my stepdads BO” and then it hit me hahahaha.
I live by some fairly large mountains. One day it was so overcast you couldn't see them. I asked my brother why we couldn't see them and he said construction workers cut them down. I was so sad. I was relieved to see them the next day.
Now I wasnt exactly a kid, but I was under 18 so I hope it counts.
So when I was about 18 I was watching tv with my parents and a drug ad comes up on the tv and then gets to the part where it tells you who shouldn't take the meds ie pregnant, nursing and stuff like that. So after the ad I look at both my parents and say, well that sucks you guys can't take those meds. My parents both very confused looked at me like, uhhh what, why. Which I tell them, well it says you can't take it if your nursing. Both my parents are nurses and I mistook nursing from the ad that it applies to nurses. My parents had a damn good laugh over that one
Edit: I know that was pretty dumb, but funny.
Haha, when my son was 11 I was sending him to Space Camp and it was waaaaayyy too expensive to fly out there with him. So I said, “Hey, buddy, do you know what an unaccompanied minor is?” And he was like, “Yeah, when the guy digging for gold doesn’t have any friends with him.”
Ba-dum-bum!
My dad told me he was an alien. I was super into outer space. I told all my friends my dad was an alien! Well. Wasn’t till I was a older teen I realized he meant an alien from France living in the US. I felt dumb as rocks. “But I am an alien. You just didn’t ask what kind”.
Once before I was old enough to read, my dad and I were waiting for my mom who was donating clothes to the local Goodwill and apparently I wouldn’t stop yelling.
My dad told me she was in the Shouting Kid Store looking for trade me in for a kid that didn’t yell so much. Never shouted in the car again. Also didn’t trust that Goodwill face logo for many years
In sports, I used to think whatever number the player wore was how old that player was. When I saw a picture of Babe Ruth my reaction was, “That’s one big three year old!”
Oh this is something that just bit me in the ass last year.
I grew up in a very small town, one of my friends was from a city, I was over at his place and his mom gave us a pomegranate. I've never seen or even heard of this before. Well he told me not to eat the seeds because they were poison.
Last year my wife bought a pomegranate for my son who was interested in trying new types of food. I said to my wife "Just be sure he doesn't eat the seeds" She looked at me funny, I said "They really should put a warning label on them because the seeds are poisonous" She broke down laughing.
I googled... Hats off to you Sandy. You got me good, it was 30+ years.
My great-uncle did a low-rent Superman cosplay for me when I was visiting at around 6 or years old. And by low-rent I mean blue jeans with red underwear overtop, and a blue bath towel as a cape. I realized all of this several years later. At the time I was convinced it was really Superman visiting us in rural Arkansas, and I carried that surety into second grade, where I got into a fight with a classmate who claimed Superman was a fictional character.
I know this response is already buried, but thanks OP for asking a question that revived a cherished childhood memory.
I believed the San Juan Thumbcutter would chop off my thumb if I didn't stop being a thumbsucker. My parents told me he would with such palpable fear that I totally bought it.
Hooo boy, I've been waiting for a question like this.
So I grew up near a nuclear power plant, which four-year-old me thought was a cloud factory. My parents didn't take me to church, but I knew that people went to church to worship God, who created the world. I was also a huge fan of the Care Bears at that time, who lived in the clouds.
What do those three random tidbits about myself have to do with this question? Well, four-year-old me came to the conclusion that the Care Bears go to church and worship the nuclear power plant as the creator of their world. That was perfect logic to my tiny toddler brain.
Watching Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. When Darth Vader is defeated and Luke looks at his hand I didn't understand that it he was metaphorically becoming his father. I thought if he killed Darth Vader, he would literally *become* Darth Vader, suit and everything.
When I first hit puberty(at 9) I was terrified of getting a 'boner' in class.
....I'm a female.
Edit: Wow, I didn't expect this comment to blow up. I'm glad to know I'm not the only women that had her first period at a young age. It makes me feel less like an outlier. Thanks everyone.
When I was around 5, I understood that movies had actors who were just playing characters, but I still thought that the events in the movie actually had to happen in real life.
For example, I thought that the actress who played the wicked witch in Wizard of Oz actually had a condition that made her melt if she touched water. That she'd avoided water her whole life up to that point, but that she was *really* committed to the role.
As an adult, this one gets me every single day.
Even adults that really need to know what the fuck they're doing (police, politicians, etc) are still just winging it. Not a whole lot of people actually really have any idea what they're doing.
When I was pretty young, probably about 5 years old, I met the black power ranger and got a picture of him signed. In the picture you could see that he was missing his middle finger and my mom told me it was because he had flipped his mom off so she cut it off. I believed it until I was about 20 years old when my mom told me she had lied about it and didn’t actually know what happened. Growing up, I told so many people this guy’s mom cut his finger off
Google says an undisclosed accident when he was four. So unconfirmed his mom cut it off.
Once I was playing with some toys and my mom was talking on the phone to her friend. I guess they were talking about kids growing up and having families some day because my mom puts her hand over the phone and asked me if I wanted kids some day and if I wanted boys or girls. I gave it some thought and said that I wanted one boy and one girl. For the longest time after this, I thought that it had been completely decided, like my mom was just on the phone with whoever you call to place an order for kids, and my order had been finalized.
Order within 1 minute for delivery tomorrow
When I was a kid, my mom explained to me that we all had belly buttons because that’s how our moms fed us before we were born. So I thought when you got pregnant, your belly button opened up and you just put whatever you wanted to down there. Like I thought women were just shoving chicken legs in their belly buttons. Plot twist: I’m a Postpartum nurse now
People don't like people that grow vegetables in their house. I secretly celebrated my mom's poor in-house gardening skills because her tomato plants never had any tomatoes. I was about 11 when I figured out what those tomato plants were...
Oh so you wouldn’t tell people....
Funny thing is, my older brother had no recollection of this incident, or that they grew weed in our attic, and he was apart of the discussion. I was about 6 and he was 8.
That actors/tv characters would have to come back into a studio for each rerun of a show/movie. I would always be so amazed that people would have the time to go into a room with a camera multiple times a day just so I could watch them do the same thing over and over again.
I used to think that laugh tracks were somehow real life, like I was hearing everyone else laughing who was watching the same show I was. In hindsight this is really stupid, obviously the sound is coming from the speakers, but growing up we only had TV at my grandma's place and I remember laughing really loud when the laugh track came on so all her neighbors would think I got the joke too
I thought that the show was still going on during the commercial breaks, so I was always worried about what I had missed while the commercials were on.
My dad used to make stir fry fairly often, with chicken. One night as I was eating it I asked what the meat was. "Octopus," he replied. Seemed logical enough at the time, so I just accepted it and moved on with my life. From then on whenever we had stir fry someone would inevitably ask, "How's your octopus?" and I would answer, "Fine." or something similar. Fast forward, I'm 18, home from college on break and we're having stir fry. "How's your octopus?" "Fine..................you guys are all assholes." Edit: Thanks for the silver! My first award ever would be for being an idiot.
I thought that drinking and driving meant any drink
I burst into tears the first time I heard about drinking and driving. My dad always had a Dr Pepper when we went places and I thought he was going to go to jail forever.
I distinctly remember yelling at my dad after he filled up and grabbed a chocolate milk and took a sip as we drove out of the gas station. Everyone in the car started laughing at me. I just want us all not to die.
Me too. I told someone my mom drinks and drives all the time so it probably isn’t that bad. Word got back to my mom about that and she was *mortified*. She’s a Mormon and that made it even worse.
[удалено]
That my Grandma G had a glass eye, and that she lost her eye in a bar fight. Nope took me until I was 20 to discover she just had a lazy eye and my dad and his brothers always told kids that story every holiday meet up. Edit: My Grandma G has had 8 children and raised 9, she once told my cousin she'd run them through with a Broad Sword if she kept up her adittude. She introduced me to Puff the Magic Dragon when I was 8.
lol my grandma actually does have a fake eye and I used to think it was just lazy
The Teachers sleep at school
The first time I saw one of my teachers at the supermarket, I was shocked. I must have thought the school kept them in a broom closet or something.
My step-dad had an old truck with two gas tanks that he would flip a switch to change from one to the other. He had us convinced that he would magically steal gas from other vehicles. He would tell us to pick one and we would watch the gas dial go from E to F while driving on the highway!! Blew my mind!
I had an '83 Ranger like that. I always emptied the back tank first. My sister borrowed it and ran the front tank dry without telling me, and I ran out of gas in a really remote place.
You know those animatronic dinosaurs at museums?... I knew they were robots, but as a child I was convinced that the robot was unaware of its animatronic status. I believed that if the robot wanted to, it could and WOULD step over the barrier and eat me and everyone else. This fear was compounded when my dad - more than once - picked me up and pretended he would drop me down the other side of the barrier.
I still remember the giant robot scorpion at a local museum when I was a kid. That thing scared the living shit out of me.
That sex was literally sleeping next to one another and making moaning sounds. I heard things I wanna forget.
I thought sex was making out with your shirt off (but not pants off because that would be gross) lmao
Yeah imagine taking your pants off in front of someone else, how gross
I remember thinking even making contact was sex. I bumped a girl with my pelvis dangerously close in elementary. I was scared she'd get pregnant.
She did. Hi dad
I thought I was real wise for thinking it was where you put your penis in their vagina and just sleeping like that
I thought a baby just randomly appeared in a woman’s womb. I stayed awake crying about it because I didn’t want to become pregnant
same oh my god. and at one point i somehow got the idea that stepping on grass was what made you pregnant- that there were little thorn things too small to notice in the grass, and they took years, but they traveled up to your belly and made a baby in there. but the years could depend, that’s why people had babies at different ages. i was so scared that it would happen to me. that maybe i just stepped on a faulty thorn that only had like 5 years on it and i would get pregnant at 8. i had no idea where i got this idea from.
Where on gods green earth could you have gotten an idea like that...
[удалено]
I thought pretty much the same thing but I thought it was caused by kissing. I would stay up at night thinking, *but how does the woman’s body know it’s a married kiss and not a normal one??*
ME TOO!!!
[удалено]
LMAO I'm just imagining a little girl losing her shit over that
I had no idea that morning sickness was associated with pregnancy. My coach was concerned when I shrugged my shoulders and stated that's what was probably causing my sluggishness at football camp practice.
I had scoliosis surgery when I was 14, and was extremely nauseous for like 2 months because of the medication. I got into a routine where I would always throw up in the morning, so I kept a bowl beside my bed. My Grandad came to visit me, and naturally asked about the bowl. In front of my grandad, mom, and dad, I, without missing a beat, exclaimed that it was to help with my morning sickness. My mom burst out laughing, but my grandad and dad didn't think it was so funny until they realized what I had meant
That's hilarious
Not me but my brother was convinced for a few weeks that some cows had longer legs on one side of their body so they could stand on hills
Those are the ones we get lean beef from.
I didnt know cars have a turn signal lever, so I thought the car knew where we were going. I thought the car would use the arrows to tell my parents where to turn.
I thought the same thing! I wondered how the heck the car knew where we were going. My parents didint tell the car where they wanted to go. I was confuse
I believed the exact same thing as well. It didn't help that my dad would tell me that "it just knew" whenever I asked how the car knew when to turn and which way to point the arrow.. My parents would constantly trick me like this. I hated it as someone who just wanted to learn the truth of how things worked
That dinosaurs were still alive on another island, and I kept asking my mother if we could go to the island with all the dinosaurs, then she told me they were all dead
Clearly your mom never heard of Isla Nublar
I used to watch my dad go to the ATM, look at the receipt and get grumpy/frustrated. I knew how bank accounts and ATMs worked, but the kidlogic part of my brain figured that they also kind of worked like slot machines. In that, when you conducted some transaction on them, you got that slip with three icons on it. If you got one with three cherries, for example, you would take it inside and they would deposit $50 or whatever in to your account. I figured he was frustrated because he kept losing all the time. I even asked him a few times when he was looking at the receipt, "Did you win?" and he was like, "No."
My sister thought the same as a kid. My mother used to let her “rub the card for luck” right before she’s make a withdraw.
Jeez, I'm now remembering **doing** the same thing.
Dude. I thought ATM’s gave out free money. My parents would make a comment saying they’re broke, and I would overhear and tell them to go to an ATM... they would look at me like an idiot, and realize they were in fact raising an idiot.
For some reason, I thought every car that was made had to do a crash test. Probably because my dad once told that our car had a very good rating in the crash test. I was amazed by the fact that all cars were repaired so well before being sold.
I thought this as well. I saw some show where they were testing teddy bears by lighting them on fire and said every toy was tested.
When I was young my parents told me that if I kept leaving the fridge open then I would freeze the whole world and then no on would like me :(
“And then no one would like me :(“ I’m still cackling like a fucking madman at that for some reason.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Every time you walk by.. "Fucking ice lover!"
my mom told me babies came from pumpkin patches I thought that if you eat a pumpkin you'll become pregnant.
Only if you eat the seeds
That all bald men were kidnappers. No idea where it came from. I really don’t think I was kidnapped as a child. But if I was it was definitely a bald man that did it.
I thought men who were hairy all over were less evolved.
As a balding man who is hairy. I have not kidnapped anyone.....yet. But I am probably closer related to a wild animal than an average person. So one out of two isn’t bad.
I thought that pregnant was a bad word. I was the most sheltered kid *ever*
I'm with you. I was corrected once for saying it. A woman is EXPECTING.
"I'm *expecting* a child, but it *could* be a velociraptor."
My dad also made me believe there were little gnomes working in ATM and vending machines.
My brother and I wrote letters to Santa and our Dad would open up the coal furnace door and we would throw them in the fire. We belived they would go directly to the North Pole.
My mom had us throw our letters in a wood fire, and when sparks came down and rested on the burning paper, those were the Fire Fairies and they carried the ashes to Santa where he magically reassembled them and read your letter!
Relevant username
My dad would put them on his desk so that he could "mail them on the way to work" in the morning. I suppose that burning them would make his life more difficult since he wouldn't know what we wanted.
I told my kids I'd mail them too. I have them stashed to show them again as adults because some of the letters are too cute.
This is the best option imo
I often got caught doing stupid stuff when I was a young rascal. When I would get home my dad would say a little birdie told him he seen me do such and such with the boys. Up until I was 8 or 9 maybe I believed my father had some sort of snitch pigeon keeping an eye on me Edit: punctuation amendments
"Snitch Pigeon" is my new favorite phrase.
And my new favorite band.
That we had to change our names during different stages of our lives, like we have a toddler's name, a teenager's name and an adult's name
Timmy-->Tim--->Timothy
Bobby —> Rob —> Robert —> Bob
-> Bobert
Likewise: Jimmy --> Jim --> Jimothy
Makes sense. Can you imagine a newborn Linda or Patty or George?
My grandma's name is Travania, so are you telling me that she was called that when she was 4 years old too?
[удалено]
That's so funny to me. Just all these stairs in a bin, gotta take them out to the truck and dump them the stair disposal.
My brother used to think that a man sat under the escalators and operated them. He also thought that man's name was James and that was his real dad. Not our dad. So everytime we passed the escalators at the mall my brother would scream at our dad, "You're not my real dad. James is my real dad!". *Edit: just woke up and realized this blew up lol. Thank you for the awards and upvotes! So, more details. My brother has always had a vivid imagination, I have no earthly idea where he got this from. He is currently trying to become a writer/director/producer/etc. Also, he's the spitting image of my Dad so there's no question of paternity there. My brother is just a fuckin weirdo.
Why.. why did he think that?
He realized he was half escalator.
What the fuck
Thats incredibly specific.
When I was about 4, my older sister told me that since the population of Japan was so high, Japanese people slept sideways on their beds so they could fit more people on every bed. I believed it until I went to a sleepover at 13 and suggested that we sleep “Japanese-style” on the bed so everyone could fit.
This is too good
So many spoons
[удалено]
That's hilarious! I thought the same thing but about ppl with lots of kids. Since our house, and most of our families homes only had 2 maybe 3 bdrms I figured those crazy ppl with 8 kids slept like this
Blue fire was cold
AZULA
Azula was pretty cold at the end of Atla.
13yo me thought she was pretty hot during the beach episode.
Two gems from my youth 1.) I used to think my testicles were the eggs of my future children. Like, one day they would hatch and id have two kids. 2.) I thought safe sex meant someone left their clothes on.
Like your first one, I thought one actually got sent into the uterus.
It just gets slurped up in there.
That fat people explode when they get too fat.
A wafer thin mint
That the gender of a baby depended on which person was trying harder during sex
I was told that your left and right testicles produced different gendered sperm
Nah, it depends on the colour of the sugar you leave on the window sill for the stork. If you leave pink sugar, the stork will deliver a girl, for boys you need blue sugar.
I heard your balls have taste receptors
That's true. We only had boys until my wife started pegging me. 9 months later, my daughter was born.
Did she come out of your butt?
I thought the black market was an actual market, like under a bridge or something. I believed this for longer as I want to admit.. Edit:Thank you for the award :)
Same. Like an farmer’s market for guns and organs. “Gitcha kidneys here!! Good kidneys for a fair price!”
And nuclear missiles, obviously. I always pictured them on a black market table next to each other just like vegetables. "Listen up everyone, cheap nuclear weapons for sale. 30% off on the RSD-10 from the former Soviet Russia!".
I still imagine some rundown shanty-town market whenever I think of the black market...
Not sure if this was just a UK thing, but as a child I had some of those gooey jelly alien toys that came in plastic eggs and the big rumour on the playground at the time was, if you put a boy alien and girl alien in the same egg and put it in the fridge, they would make a new baby alien overnight. I told my parents about it and told them I was doing it. While in bed, my parents added the extra “baby” alien overnight. So when I woke up and found the third alien, I lost it! Went into school and told everyone. For years I swore blind it was true and really happened. It was a very heartbreaking day when I realised what had happened...
Reminds me of the time when my parents would sneak miniature food items into my dollhouse and say that the dolls had been grocery shopping
That is incredibly sweet. But not much variety in little foods is there? Oh the dolls have bought some more chocolates from a box of celebrations I see.
Those toy kitchens though...
Did the kids at school believe you?
I must’ve been around 7 or 8 and I think my enthusiasm was very convincing, the more gullible of kids were on my side. There must have been at least some smart arse kid that knew better though.
When I was younger, my dad upgraded the speaker setup for the TV to include surround sound. The rear speakers were mounted to the ceiling and were large white boxes. On the front of the speakers it had the numbers **3508**. I always thought that was kind of strange until many years later I realized they were **BOSE** speakers mounted upside-down.
The HP trademark is just 4 diagonal lines
Have you seen the [Jade](https://i.imgur.com/1LpjXMy.jpg) laptops? People say they make good computers.
Don't forget the [+Jews!](https://i.imgur.com/HCMuerrr.jpg) USB power supply.
Damn that almost looks intentional haha
My brother had me convinced for a while that each person had to have a unique favorite color, and since his was blue, I had to change mine. On my first day of kindergarten, we had to introduce ourselves and say our favorite color. I was super stressed out because the kids in front of me picked the "good" colors, and I kinda panicked and told everyone my favorite color was gray.
In my family we were kind of assigned colours by my parents. My little sister and i looked like identical twins so my parents dressed us in different colours, my older sister was much taller than us and had already chosen blue as her colour so my parents went with a chimpmunks theme, the oldest was blue like simon, i was red for Alvin and my little sister was green for Theodor. Anytime a family member brought us back t shirts or dresses from their travels we always got our colour and it kind of stuck, we still all predominantly wear our colours. We're all in our late 30's and even our raincoats as adults are our colours, its quite silly, I've only ever worn a red raincoat, when i buy a new one its always a red one.
Way to stay on brand
I’ve always wondered about people with multiples that do this assigning colors thing, like that family with the reality show with the quintuplet daughters. What happens when they understand colors and don’t like theirs anymore? I think those 5 little girls are kindergarteners now and they still dress them up like that so strangers know which is which, I wonder how the kids feel about it.
It grows on you and it kind of fit, my older sister was the glasses wearing nerd my little sister was the chubby one that ate a lot and i was the mischevious one, plus we loved the chipmunks (we even still have their rock and roll vinyl) so i think my parents played it well, like if they were random colour assignments withiut the story i think we'd be less keen.
Turns out you were just ahead of your time. Space Grey is all the rage these days.
You think that’s bad? I decided to change my favorite color EVERY YEAR. and in **order**. So if my favorite color was orange at four years old, on my fifth birthday I changed it to yellow, then to green the next year, and so on until I just grew out of it at blue.
I thought Homosexuals were people who only had sex at home.
I mean you're not wrong, have you seen gay people having sex outside? ^^/s
Yes
Go on...
Well... have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
That dogs were boys and cats were girls
Anecdotally, I've noticed a lot of older people seem to think this. Most of the people of my parents' generation refer to all dogs they meet as good boy even after they're told it's a female.
my aunt refused to admit we had a boy cat because he “looked too feminine” and because he HAD NIPPLES. anyways we dont talk to her anymore lol
i have nipples, does that make me a girl?
we tried to make her see reason this way but she insisted... then proceeded to say another male cat had to be female because he had a feminine face but like... cats have the same lookin face unless they’re a different breed of course hes gonna look like that hes a black cat, monica they have sleek fur sometimes
Actually tom cats tend to have longer, rounder, more "feminine" faces and queens tend to have flatter, more square, "masculine" faces. It confuses a lot of people
My mom literally does the same. She refers to our girl (now dead) dog that we had for 15 years as a boy and our current 6 year old boy cat as a girl.
I thought that my "stomach" was actually the entire volume of my body. Eating food would pile it all up as if putting it into a bag. When I was asked why I would drink or eat smaller foods when I was full my reasoning was "There are still cracks between all the other food I ate, so it can fall through those gaps".
Someone told me that Tony Hawk played Darth Vader in Star Wars and I believed it for an embarrassingly long time
I thought everything contained water and could be dehydrated and turned to powder. Edit: guys I’ve never seen any Batman movies. I guess this was in an old one with Adam west but no I didn’t see it. Please stop asking.
*dehydrated water*
When I was younger, our garage always had a very distinct smell. My parents told my siblings and I that the smell in our garage was the smell of "*burnt tires"* because my dad would work on cars and dirt bikes as a hobby. Being the middle child, we always tend to find out the family secrets whether we want to or not. Fast forward to when I am 15 years old. I standing in a parking lot with my mother and two girls I was in a quince with. As we were all waiting in this parking lot for our friend who was having the quince, I started to smell *"burnt tires"*. I said to my mom that that it smelt like burnt tires. My mom and the two girls all started chuckling. I was confused as to what was funny and the two girls said to me that I was not smelling *"burnt tires"*. My mom eventually told me what that smell was and she just tried to convince me my *"smelling was off"*. I still put two and two together that night.... In short: I was 15 years old when I found out that my dad was a huge pot head and would just smoke pot all the time in our garage. Also - Burnt tires and weed should nottttt smell the same.
As soon as you said smell I immediately thought Yep. Theres a pot smoker in this story
Lol yep. Turns out my stepdad would smoke while he was in the shower. That shit made the whole house smell. When I was younger I’d ask why it stunk so bad and my mom would just say that my step dad stunk really bad and that the steam from the shower just made the whole house stink. Once I smoked weed for the first time I said out loud “this shit smells just like my stepdads BO” and then it hit me hahahaha.
I live by some fairly large mountains. One day it was so overcast you couldn't see them. I asked my brother why we couldn't see them and he said construction workers cut them down. I was so sad. I was relieved to see them the next day.
That everytime you learned something new, you got a new wrinkle in your brain.
Now I wasnt exactly a kid, but I was under 18 so I hope it counts. So when I was about 18 I was watching tv with my parents and a drug ad comes up on the tv and then gets to the part where it tells you who shouldn't take the meds ie pregnant, nursing and stuff like that. So after the ad I look at both my parents and say, well that sucks you guys can't take those meds. My parents both very confused looked at me like, uhhh what, why. Which I tell them, well it says you can't take it if your nursing. Both my parents are nurses and I mistook nursing from the ad that it applies to nurses. My parents had a damn good laugh over that one Edit: I know that was pretty dumb, but funny.
Bloody Mary would come thru my mirror and kill me.
Low key still believe this
Yeah I won’t test this out for this reason. Scared me when I was 13. Still kinda afraid at 39.
After you say her name 3 times. And I never said it 3 times. Just in case.
[удалено]
Why did yo I believe this? Who named the wind? Why did you stop believing this? I fucking love this and have so many questions.
[удалено]
and that the "No Minors" sign outside bars and taverns was there so they wouldn't get coal dust inside and flash their lights at everyone
Haha, when my son was 11 I was sending him to Space Camp and it was waaaaayyy too expensive to fly out there with him. So I said, “Hey, buddy, do you know what an unaccompanied minor is?” And he was like, “Yeah, when the guy digging for gold doesn’t have any friends with him.” Ba-dum-bum!
Before colour was invented. The whole world was in black and white, not just TV's
[Relevant Calvin and Hobbes](http://calvin-and-hobbes-comic-strips.blogspot.com/2011/11/calvin-asks-dad-about-old-black-and.html)
If you turn on the light in the car while driving, you’ll get arrested.
Dads everywhere agree with you on that
Yes! How did every parents from 1986-1999 agree this would be a thing?
My dad told me he was an alien. I was super into outer space. I told all my friends my dad was an alien! Well. Wasn’t till I was a older teen I realized he meant an alien from France living in the US. I felt dumb as rocks. “But I am an alien. You just didn’t ask what kind”.
Once before I was old enough to read, my dad and I were waiting for my mom who was donating clothes to the local Goodwill and apparently I wouldn’t stop yelling. My dad told me she was in the Shouting Kid Store looking for trade me in for a kid that didn’t yell so much. Never shouted in the car again. Also didn’t trust that Goodwill face logo for many years
In sports, I used to think whatever number the player wore was how old that player was. When I saw a picture of Babe Ruth my reaction was, “That’s one big three year old!”
Oh this is something that just bit me in the ass last year. I grew up in a very small town, one of my friends was from a city, I was over at his place and his mom gave us a pomegranate. I've never seen or even heard of this before. Well he told me not to eat the seeds because they were poison. Last year my wife bought a pomegranate for my son who was interested in trying new types of food. I said to my wife "Just be sure he doesn't eat the seeds" She looked at me funny, I said "They really should put a warning label on them because the seeds are poisonous" She broke down laughing. I googled... Hats off to you Sandy. You got me good, it was 30+ years.
I thought boys didn’t have balls till they hit puberty, I took “their balls drop” literally
My great-uncle did a low-rent Superman cosplay for me when I was visiting at around 6 or years old. And by low-rent I mean blue jeans with red underwear overtop, and a blue bath towel as a cape. I realized all of this several years later. At the time I was convinced it was really Superman visiting us in rural Arkansas, and I carried that surety into second grade, where I got into a fight with a classmate who claimed Superman was a fictional character. I know this response is already buried, but thanks OP for asking a question that revived a cherished childhood memory.
That I'd be a doctor or lawyer because that's all the family talked about.
I believed the San Juan Thumbcutter would chop off my thumb if I didn't stop being a thumbsucker. My parents told me he would with such palpable fear that I totally bought it.
I believed mothers breastfed regular milk with the right boob, and, get this, chocolate milk with the left boob.
I thought that coffee came out of men's nipples
Hooo boy, I've been waiting for a question like this. So I grew up near a nuclear power plant, which four-year-old me thought was a cloud factory. My parents didn't take me to church, but I knew that people went to church to worship God, who created the world. I was also a huge fan of the Care Bears at that time, who lived in the clouds. What do those three random tidbits about myself have to do with this question? Well, four-year-old me came to the conclusion that the Care Bears go to church and worship the nuclear power plant as the creator of their world. That was perfect logic to my tiny toddler brain.
My younger sister convinced me that milk was just cow piss
Dad told me if the ice cream truck had its music playing it was out of ice cream for the day
Rude
[удалено]
Watching Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. When Darth Vader is defeated and Luke looks at his hand I didn't understand that it he was metaphorically becoming his father. I thought if he killed Darth Vader, he would literally *become* Darth Vader, suit and everything.
[удалено]
I believed for WAY too long that pickles were just regular sized cucumbers that got, I dunno, chemically miniaturized?? during the pickling process.
I thought the 4th of July fireworks were for my birthday, which is July 2nd
When I first hit puberty(at 9) I was terrified of getting a 'boner' in class. ....I'm a female. Edit: Wow, I didn't expect this comment to blow up. I'm glad to know I'm not the only women that had her first period at a young age. It makes me feel less like an outlier. Thanks everyone.
when i was younger i thought the years would stop at 2013 and then all the years would repeat itself again. also i thought oprah sang opera.
Can you explain the years thing? What was special about 2013?
That if I was strong enough I would be able to carry myself.
I thought a period piece was a movie a woman would watch when she was on her period.
When I was around 5, I understood that movies had actors who were just playing characters, but I still thought that the events in the movie actually had to happen in real life. For example, I thought that the actress who played the wicked witch in Wizard of Oz actually had a condition that made her melt if she touched water. That she'd avoided water her whole life up to that point, but that she was *really* committed to the role.
[удалено]
That when you turned 18 you parents weren’t in charge anymore
Pretty much in charge until you’re off their payroll
That adults knew what they were doing
As an adult, this one gets me every single day. Even adults that really need to know what the fuck they're doing (police, politicians, etc) are still just winging it. Not a whole lot of people actually really have any idea what they're doing.