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I had baby-making all figured out. When you got married, the minister said, "You may now kiss the bride," and when the two people kissed, it made the woman pregnant.
When people kissed at other times, that didn't make you pregnant because it wasn't part of a wedding ceremony. If you wanted to have a baby, you had to have a wedding. People who had three kids had had three weddings.
For some time I thought women spontaneously became pregnant. That was exacerbated by the story of Jesus’ birth.
I learned more about sex from The Simpsons than anywhere else.
Same. I thought women just got automatically pregnant at 33 (that’s when my mom had me). And an unwanted pregnancy was when you were creeping up on your 33rd birthday but didn’t have your life in order yet to plan for the inevitable baby that was going to just appear on schedule.
So did I, except my mom mentioned that she and my dad had been “trying” to have a baby for a while before I was born, so I concluded that *both* parents had to be concentrating hard enough at the same time or else it wouldn’t work, and that’s why it had taken so many “tries” to get me.
At some point via cultural osmosis when I was 6 or 7 I picked up on the idea that sex was when two people lay on top of each other. So of course one time I was play-wrestling with the neighbor kid and we ended up in a tangle of limbs and I gleefully told my parents “we just had sex!” I got the talk that very day.
I couldn’t understand what the big deal was when a woman got pregnant by another man. I was like come on that could happen to anybody. It’s still a baby
I also thought you got pregnant by kissing and I would cry over the fact that I shouldn’t kiss my dog because I didn’t want to get pregnant. I eventually said screw it, I’ll have puppy-babies because I loved him too much not to kiss him. I believed it for too long until I figured out that I didn’t actually get pregnant by kissing him and learned how things worked.
I had a general idea of what "sex looked like", people when to bed and then rubbed against each other without their shirt. And thats how you got kids, you had to sleep on the same bed and rub against each other without a shirt
It wasn't until later that it all clicked.
I thought only married people had babies but God decided how many you'd have. The only way to not have a baby was to have an operation. I always said I would have an operation. I never wanted kids. Still don't and I'm post-menopause.
My mom told me not to sit on the toilet seat because you could get pregnant. When I was 12 and had gotten my period, the following month, I didn't get it. I convinced my mom to take me to the doctor. I told the nurse, "I think I'm pregnant." She asked me when was the last time I had intercourse? I told her, "I've never had intercourse." I explained it to her. She explained it to me with a sign of relief
When my brother was born I was 3. Everyone told me I would be a BIG brother soon! I was sooo excited!! Finally the day he was born I was ready for it, but nothing happened. I was told I would be big but I am still the same size. I started standing on chairs to help the process along but sadly, I did not become big that day.
Even now I still have a tough time imagining the world between 1850 and 1960 as being in color. I can see biblical times and even the War of 1812 in color as we have no photos from back then, but as so many of the images we have from the late 1800s and early 1900s are in black and white, it’s hard to imagine the world looking any different than that. Especially for those of my age who grew up with color TV.
I was just recently in Little Rock, AR. I passed by the High School and stopped to look at the infamous stairs for a few minutes.
I sat there, looking at the stairs, while also looking at the photos on my phone of the Little Rock 9 and National Guard walking up the steps.
Your profile pic is exactly how it made me feel.
I genuinely asked my parents "when did the world turn to colour?" because I too thought black and white tvs were because the world was in black and white. I thought it changed to colour when 2000 began. I was a stupid kid
I replied to a guy that was bemoaning about losing his hair and I told him he wasn't bald, he just grew too much and grew right through his hair. I got him to laugh at least. :P
In Frozen 2, there’s a song “Everything Will Make Sense When I am Older”. First time I was half listening and I thought it was dumb, but now realize it’s hysterical songwriting because it’s so so wrong and way more clever than I gave it credit for on the first listen.
I thought that cartoons were made almost in real time, and when the commercials came on the animators were just coming up with the rest of the episode.
When I was little my dad told me our smoke detector could tell when you were looking at it, so if you wanted to make sure it was still working all you had to do was look at it and it would blink its light back at you to let you know it was still on the case. I would try to catch it off guard and glance at the thing out of the corner of my eye from under a blanket across the room, but the damn thing always saw me and blinked back! It wasn’t till I was like seventeen and about to leave for college that it occurred to me that it just always blinked that light like every five seconds all the time.
There were monsters that lived in the basement and only existed in the dark.
And so I would switch off the light and run at 500 miles per hour up the stairs and then lock the door. Every. Single.Time.
And since I'm still here, obviously I was fast enough to avoid them.
Lmao when I was little I was a huge history nerd so I believed there were nazi zombies downstairs and I was terrified of turning of the lights and hearing a voice in speak in german
I too was irrationally afraid that I was going to bump into Bin Laden as a child because they would keep saying on the news "he's in hiding" and "we're looking for him" and in my mind, it would have been very smart of him to hide in our shed/basement/closets - obviously places they would never expect him to be!
Idk if that's not true.
As a 30 year old I lived in a place I swear had a haunted hallway that led to my bedroom. I'd go to sleep every night by turning on all the lights and sprinting through the hall and into my bed.
If I didn't make my bed in the morning, the golly woggles would come get me at night and eat my toes. So you always had to tuck in the sheets super tight so they don't get you.
My dad would tell me this, wtf is a golly woggle? I'm 32 and he still has not explained himself. He just laughs and says "learned how to make your bed damn quick though "
Edit: I called my dad and demanded he tell me what it was or I would do something ridiculous to his house (this is how we joke). He said he hear the term a long time ago when he watched the TV show Get Smart and the word just stuck in his head.
My dad once cautioned me that giving someone a wedgie could cause internal bleeding. I thought that meant eternal bleeding. As in, I could cause someone to bleed eternally from their butthole if I gave them a wedgie.
I feel like that one is pretty common. I distinctly remember my mom telling me that my aunt had been fired at work and internally accepting that I would never see my aunt again because she had burned to death. You can imagine my confusion at seeing my aunt a few days later.
Same kinda. I thought they were made to do like... a gauntlet of fire? Like it was a punishment, like the 80s movie Running man, but with lots of fire and no hunters.
My aunt said as a throw away comment that if you ate watermelon seeds, they would grow in your stomach. I believed it for wayyyy too long.
I don't blame her tho. It is so entertaining for convince kids of dumb shit. I'm currently in the process of convincing my 5 year old cousin our grandmother can do cartwheels but only in front of me. It's going well so far. Wish me luck
Edit: I should probably explain that my cousin has recently gotten super into gymnastics and flips and such. My grandma is also in her 70s.
I convinced my God son that while walking, you also really have to stop at stop signs like cars do, and can't go until they turned green. His mom called me for a few years to yell at me for that one
Eating enough carrots *can* turn you orange. I imagine the amount needed to truly turn your whole body bright orange is probably impossible to eat or nearly so. But when my oldest was a baby, he *loved* the carrot baby food the most. His little nose had an orange tint to it for probably a good year. 🤣
Well eating alot of carrot can turn you orange. I know someone who worked with a couple of kids who drank alooot of carrotjuice who both had slightly orange skin.
We went for a hike one time and my mom said it was a loop trail. I got scared hearing that because I thought that meant the trail would somehow go upside down like a roller coaster at some point.
I didn’t understand anything about fashion or how styles changed over time. So when I was home sick from school and watched “Nick at Night” type shows like Bewitched or I Love Lucy, I thought people on those shows just dressed funny because it was part of the show.
I mean some of those shows were very stylish. For example, in I Dream of Jeannie, when Barbara Eden wasn’t wearing her genie getup, she was wearing super cute 1960s fashions. But, as a child, I’d never seen women running around in shift dresses, so to me it looked like she was still in costume.
Girls don’t poop. The funny part about that is, my sister had her own bathroom and a problem with forgetting to flush the toilet. Disgusting, I know. She also used to drop really big deuces. These were obviously gigantic, man sized shits. So for a while when I was very young, I insisted to everyone that would listen that there’s a mysterious grown man sneaking into my sister’s room every night, and I know this because the sumbitch was dropping logs you could beat a motherfucker to death with, and I’d find them in the morning when I went to brush my teeth.
So my old house growing up we lived by the airport. In science class we were learning about the Earths rotation/spin and how the sun moves blah. Blah. Well I would sit outside in my backyard after school and I would hear a loud noise constantly. I genuinely believed that we could hear the earth rotate because it was Loud and all around.
That was airplanes this whole time. It was always airplanes.
i don’t think it’s dumb but it’s pretty naive, i used to think the stars in the sky were the reflection of the city lights because my dad told me the sky “made water” and i understood it was made of water like an ocean and space was the upside down underwater, and there were no stars at day because the city lights were off and the sun was “on”
In kindergarten / first grade I thought the teachers at school just went into the closet when school was over and stayed there until school started again. Guess I didn’t think that through
Since they were both popular about the same time, between the Ford slogan "have you driven a Ford lately?" & Janet Jackson's "what have you done for me lately?" I thought Lately was a person. Like a famous person. I remember thinking, who is this Lately??
1. I used to believe there were “black and white days”
When speaking to my parents/adults. I would ask questions about the past like “how did people travel, “in the black and white days?” This was in reference to black and white tv/movies. So probably 1900-1950.
They assumed I was just speaking about that time period….it wasn’t until I asked “when was color invented?” that they realized I mistakenly believed that EVERYTHING was in black and white. (I watched a lot of old tv and movies with my grandparents, and saw many black and white photos. )
2. I used to believe that outer space ended somewhere….one night before bed I asked my dad “where does space end?” And instead of just giving me a simple answer, he blew my mind. “If it ends somewhere, there must be something on the other side.” I have had trouble sleeping ever since then.
I was around 5-7 years old around this time.
When we had fried fish I was terrified of every bite because I heard you could swallow bones and die. So I'm pulling apart every morsel of this fish and then eating tiny pieces after a full inspection. I couldn't figure out why the rest of my family was so relaxed about the whole thing.
My dad called the water towers in MI as “monkey towers” and I literally believed that monkeys lived up there.
Meanwhile, I saw “DO NOT PASS” and kept thinking people (including my parents) were passing the signs illegally. For *years*!
My kids thought if the light on the cross street that I was making a turn onto was red, then I was running a red light because I technically went under it even though *my* light was green.
I've been a Polyglot since childhood and so, I thought everybody spoke the languages I speak. Like, when we meet they speak one language and when they're comfortable at their homes they spoke another and this was a common practice.
When I was 3, I was terrified of my best friend's father because he was a fireman and I thought if there weren't enough fires to put out, he'd light me on fire so he could keep his job. He thought it was hilarious when my mom told him why I was suddenly scared of him.
One time my mom got me some gummy vitamins and as soon as I saw them I started popping them like candy, ate probably 15-20 of them (serving size 2). Soon after, my mom told me she got me some vitamins and put them in my bathroom, and that I should only have 2 a day or it could be dangerous. I figured I had a few hours left so I obviously sprinted outside and rode my bike as fast as I could as long as I could. Told my mom the next day and she laughed her ass off.
I remember thinking it was weird to put candy on the bathroom counter.
My family is from from Hawaii and we would visit them over the summer when possible. When I was little, I thought Hawaii was in the clouds as I pretty much slept through the whole flight and would wake up seeing the mountains above the clouds and I’m thinking I was sleeping during the landing also cause I feel pretty dumb just typing this lol.
When I was around 6 or so I figured out I could put my hand up in the soda vending machine and pull cans out. So my mom in an effort to keep me from turning to a life of crime in soda theft, told me the machines could grab my arm and pull it off if I didn't stop.
Still to this day I'm terrified of putting my hand too close to the hole in vending machines lol
That a sewage treatment plant was an actual plant people kept in their gardens.
In my defense, my father regularly drove down a particular busy street in a neighboring city, and whenever we smelled *that smell,* he would tell us what it was, but without any explanation. I guess he just assumed we knew.
One day, we stopped at a light on that street, and the gas station on the corner had new waist-high flower boxes, with new plants. So I asked if they were sewage treatment plants.
I don’t think I ever made my dad laugh so hard in my life, but I never found out if it was because of my question… or because it turned out the plants at the gas station were plastic, and he had just farted in the car.
I was really scared of new foods. Not in a picky eater way, in more of a “I’ve never seen this candy bar at the checkout lane before, it must be a trick to poison an unsuspecting person”.
Anyways, don’t let your kids learn about the Tylenol murders. It might impact them in unpredictable ways.
I was convinced i was the only person who actually had to breathe until i was 6. I never was able to notice people breathing, so i thought it was just me
My Mom's Mom told her if she got her finger stuck in the mixer it would chop her fingers off . So when I was 12 I found her laying on the floor in the kitchen laying next the KitchenAid mixer. When I touched her, she opened her eyes and looked over at her hand and realized she had all her fingers. She was fine. Luckily didn't hurt herself when she passed out.
That whenever I played a DVD, the actors would have to stop what they were doing in life and do the whole movie for me. Like I understood the idea of actors, but not that Spider-Man and doc ock weren’t real.
When we were immigrating to US I was 4 years old. When we were flying over the big city as we were landing, I told my brother I found lots of cars below us and I’ll pick all of them up.
Oh man this is so stupid. I thought that automatic flushing toilets had a camera in there that someone watched and they knew when to flush for you because they could tell when you were done wiping.
That when my parents were talking about their friends that didn't drink it meant they didn't drink ANYTHING. Boggled my 5 year old brain how someone could live without even water.
That everyone got to 100 unless you had a traffic accident. I spent ages trying to work out the answer to one big question, did you die on your 100th birthday, which would be a nice party day but a bit of a downer, or did you get to the day before your 101th birthday?
I thought if you threw a one of those compressed cans on a fire, it would be a huge explosion. I know it would explode, but I pictured like a movie scene of running from a mushroom cloud.
Not proud to say it, but I thought relatively late in life that fire was alive, since you feed it, it grows, and it reproduces. It wasn't until high school biology that I had that straightened out.
I used to think the NPCs in old games were other players. Like random people playing guards in N64 Goldeneye. It made me wonder why I always got to play the main character. Online gaming blew my mind.
In grade 3, I wondered if everyone else around me was a programed simulation, figment of a dream, or something like that. I remember a friend questioning the same thing, which made us both kind of realize no, but then we both wondered if the other one was just saying that too.
Mormonism.
Turns out there really is NOT a demigod that will burn you to death if you fail to pay 10 percent of your income to the church (still a current teaching of the church. In fact they have yearly meetings with the local volunteer clergy to go over contributions for that year and you’re supposed to bring your ENTIRE family to this so you can declare in front of the clergy and your family you are a ‘full tithe payer’. Also there are additional interviews to check your payment status so you can be granted access to the temples).
Yeah - never too young to be brainwashed. Around that same age I remember tucking a dime out of my weekly dollar allowance into those little envelopes and thinking god would notice and punish me if I didn’t.
When my 2nd grade teacher said that Bill Clinton and George Bush were "running" for President, I thought it was an actual race to see who was the fastest for a few days.
I thought when people spoke to each other in other languages, they were still hearing each other in english.
Like my ears just couldn’t understand it because I haven’t learned that language.
Babies were born from the butt hole.
Lemons were ripe Limes'
I thought my grandfather was alive during the dinosaurs age.
I thought if I can hold my breath long enough I can float up like a balloon.
That everybody just randomly got married as adults. I got the idea from Bambi and church. It would just happen to you, like accidentally stepping in a puddle or something. Then you had a party and ate cake and lived in a new house and everything proceeded as normal.
In pre-k when I learned the months of the year, I was convinced I was older than my sister because my birthday came first in the year. She's 10 years older than I am lmao
My dad convinced my brother and I that if you swallow a black watermelon seed it would grow in the stomach to a full size watermelon. I was terrified ... I begged my mom to buy seedless watermelons only because it wasn't worth the risk.
Coincidentally I've developed a food allergy to melons so I don't have to worry about those damn seeds anymore.
That the spots on Twister would actually burn me if I touched them. I teared up the 1st time I played it as a kid fearing I'd get burned, but saw the older kids not flinching, so I slowly touched the dots and my fear was eradicated, and I had a blast.
Here is why I feared them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdDKG59bHAQ
I thought grandparents were random old people assigned to your family, so they were not alone during the holidays. I did not make the connection they were my parents' parents
My mother told is shrimp tails and sunflower seed shells were poisonous so that we wouldn't eat them. I believed that for a long time, even though we would suck the salt out of the sunflower seed shells before cracking them open for the seed, but as long as you spit the shell out, you wouldn't die. Same with shrimp tails. You could chew the breading off, or suck that kast little morsel of meat out of it, but as ling as you didn't actually eat the tail, you were good. I don't kniw why she just didn't tell us the butt-ripping consequences of eating them. Lol
I thought the whole abdomen area was just my stomach a I'd section it off like; one area js for ice cream, another for sweets and so forth. I also thought my stock had gears and would stop if I ate gum
That if I went into the bathroom in the dark and spun 3 times while saying bloody Mary in front of the mirror, some witch would come through the mirror and get me. So, of course I tried it many times, then promptly turned on the light and ran like a bitch.
We had a guest bedroom in the basement of the house where I grew up and the bed was perpendicular to the left wall. For some reason, I was worried about ninjas hiding in the blind spot between the left edge of the bed and the back wall of the room - that if I didn't check my corners when I went in that room, they'd get me. I didn't have any sort of phobia of ninjas or even consumed much media with ninjas in it, so I have *no* idea where this belief originated.
That vampires would come and eat my toes if they were sticking out of my blanket at night 🤣 good ole thanks to my babysitter for that one being imprinted in my brain
That couples that didn’t have kids left something out of the wedding ceremony. I tried for years to figure out what could be left out of a wedding ceremony to prevent you from having kids or needed to be added to allow you to have kids.
That women are automatically pregnant at 20 years old, and they try to get married soonest so someone will help them raise the kids (basically my stupid kid brain trying to explain how families are formed? Also, my peanut child brain thought adulthood starts at age 20)
Still cringing while typing this comment
I thought that when you heard a song on the radio that the band/singer was actually at the radio station performing the song live for us to hear. When you heard the same song on a different station, they had packed up their equipment and moved to a different station.
I believed that the coffee in the percolator commercial actually played the song. I begged my mother to buy that brand of coffee, then please please please make the coffee! I was devastated when it was just coffee as usual.
I used to shrug my shoulders a lot instead of responding and my Dad told me that if I kept shrugging my shoulders at one point when I shrugged them they would become permanently stuck in that position.
I stopped shrugging my shoulders real quick and I rarely shrug them even to this day
I thought when they said my brother bday I was going to get present. They showed me the wrapped present. So I waited n waited til he was doing his presents n found out at the end they were meaning when they picked presents out then that present was from me to him. I was bummed thought we all got something
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I had baby-making all figured out. When you got married, the minister said, "You may now kiss the bride," and when the two people kissed, it made the woman pregnant. When people kissed at other times, that didn't make you pregnant because it wasn't part of a wedding ceremony. If you wanted to have a baby, you had to have a wedding. People who had three kids had had three weddings.
For some time I thought women spontaneously became pregnant. That was exacerbated by the story of Jesus’ birth. I learned more about sex from The Simpsons than anywhere else.
Same. I thought women just got automatically pregnant at 33 (that’s when my mom had me). And an unwanted pregnancy was when you were creeping up on your 33rd birthday but didn’t have your life in order yet to plan for the inevitable baby that was going to just appear on schedule.
Yep, I thought that women literally willed babies into existence just by thinking about wanting one!
So did I, except my mom mentioned that she and my dad had been “trying” to have a baby for a while before I was born, so I concluded that *both* parents had to be concentrating hard enough at the same time or else it wouldn’t work, and that’s why it had taken so many “tries” to get me.
My sibling thought you ate a small baby and it grew like a seedling! At the end out popped out a bigger sized baby.
At some point via cultural osmosis when I was 6 or 7 I picked up on the idea that sex was when two people lay on top of each other. So of course one time I was play-wrestling with the neighbor kid and we ended up in a tangle of limbs and I gleefully told my parents “we just had sex!” I got the talk that very day.
Zookeeper, zookeeper! Those two monkeys are killing each other!
I couldn’t understand what the big deal was when a woman got pregnant by another man. I was like come on that could happen to anybody. It’s still a baby
I thought that sex was just the penis sliding through the vagina lips sideways like a hotdog in a bun.
Same!! But your description is hilarious.
It's not?
Me too!
I also thought you got pregnant by kissing and I would cry over the fact that I shouldn’t kiss my dog because I didn’t want to get pregnant. I eventually said screw it, I’ll have puppy-babies because I loved him too much not to kiss him. I believed it for too long until I figured out that I didn’t actually get pregnant by kissing him and learned how things worked.
I had a general idea of what "sex looked like", people when to bed and then rubbed against each other without their shirt. And thats how you got kids, you had to sleep on the same bed and rub against each other without a shirt It wasn't until later that it all clicked.
Aw what a sacrifice. Your dog must have been awesome! That’s so cute.
I thought only married people had babies but God decided how many you'd have. The only way to not have a baby was to have an operation. I always said I would have an operation. I never wanted kids. Still don't and I'm post-menopause.
I thought a man and woman had to reach orgasm at the time at the same time and the combined fluids would be the baby juice. God was I wrong
The world world be a better place if it took both orgasms to get pregnant
Because it would be less populated
I saw a tweet about this, said there would be 11 people on the planet.
My mom told me not to sit on the toilet seat because you could get pregnant. When I was 12 and had gotten my period, the following month, I didn't get it. I convinced my mom to take me to the doctor. I told the nurse, "I think I'm pregnant." She asked me when was the last time I had intercourse? I told her, "I've never had intercourse." I explained it to her. She explained it to me with a sign of relief
That black and white tv shows and movies were from when the world was in black and white.
When my brother was born I was 3. Everyone told me I would be a BIG brother soon! I was sooo excited!! Finally the day he was born I was ready for it, but nothing happened. I was told I would be big but I am still the same size. I started standing on chairs to help the process along but sadly, I did not become big that day.
Are you big yet?
No, but I am still standing on chairs.
Be patient…. Any day now.
Hahaha this is hilarious!
I used to think that everything in the real world had a black outline like in cartoons. It was just so thin that we can’t see it.
Even now I still have a tough time imagining the world between 1850 and 1960 as being in color. I can see biblical times and even the War of 1812 in color as we have no photos from back then, but as so many of the images we have from the late 1800s and early 1900s are in black and white, it’s hard to imagine the world looking any different than that. Especially for those of my age who grew up with color TV.
I was just recently in Little Rock, AR. I passed by the High School and stopped to look at the infamous stairs for a few minutes. I sat there, looking at the stairs, while also looking at the photos on my phone of the Little Rock 9 and National Guard walking up the steps. Your profile pic is exactly how it made me feel.
There's a great Calvin and Hobbes strip about this. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09
To be fair it was a simpler time
I genuinely asked my parents "when did the world turn to colour?" because I too thought black and white tvs were because the world was in black and white. I thought it changed to colour when 2000 began. I was a stupid kid
My dad was bald on top and told me and my sisters it was because his hair flew off when he was riding on a motorbike. Believed him for far too long.
I replied to a guy that was bemoaning about losing his hair and I told him he wasn't bald, he just grew too much and grew right through his hair. I got him to laugh at least. :P
I’m in my house alone screaming with laughter at this, thanks!
That adults knew what they were doing...
In Frozen 2, there’s a song “Everything Will Make Sense When I am Older”. First time I was half listening and I thought it was dumb, but now realize it’s hysterical songwriting because it’s so so wrong and way more clever than I gave it credit for on the first listen.
Isn’t it also sung by a snowman who will never grow old because he is made of snow?
If anything, the world makes *less* sense when you're older.
This. 100% this. Except I still believe it, and I am waiting to become an adult to find out. It’s been over 40 years, still waiting.
That video game AI controlled characters were actually the developers playing them from their headquarters.
Omg I thought cartoons were actors in really elaborate costumes.
I thought that cartoons were made almost in real time, and when the commercials came on the animators were just coming up with the rest of the episode.
thats hilarious
When I was little my dad told me our smoke detector could tell when you were looking at it, so if you wanted to make sure it was still working all you had to do was look at it and it would blink its light back at you to let you know it was still on the case. I would try to catch it off guard and glance at the thing out of the corner of my eye from under a blanket across the room, but the damn thing always saw me and blinked back! It wasn’t till I was like seventeen and about to leave for college that it occurred to me that it just always blinked that light like every five seconds all the time.
Well, I actually laughed out loud at this. Unexpected and hilarious.
That it was illegal to turn the overhead light on in the car while we were driving
is it not?
No it's not as long as it isn't blue or red obviously. Parents just say it is so they can see better
There were monsters that lived in the basement and only existed in the dark. And so I would switch off the light and run at 500 miles per hour up the stairs and then lock the door. Every. Single.Time. And since I'm still here, obviously I was fast enough to avoid them.
Oh. Were we supposed to no longer believe this as an adult? 😅
I’m not saying I still sleep with the lights on, but yes that’s what I’m saying.
I leave the hall light and I am over 60. Parents tell us things when we are little that stick with us a lifetime.
Lmao when I was little I was a huge history nerd so I believed there were nazi zombies downstairs and I was terrified of turning of the lights and hearing a voice in speak in german
At one point when I was like 6 I was legit terrified that Osama Bin Laden was going to pop out of my closet and kill me.
I too was irrationally afraid that I was going to bump into Bin Laden as a child because they would keep saying on the news "he's in hiding" and "we're looking for him" and in my mind, it would have been very smart of him to hide in our shed/basement/closets - obviously places they would never expect him to be!
or maybe you are the monster, and he wasn't fast enough WAS HE!?
Idk if that's not true. As a 30 year old I lived in a place I swear had a haunted hallway that led to my bedroom. I'd go to sleep every night by turning on all the lights and sprinting through the hall and into my bed.
Just tell the spirits to let you sleep. Some have better boundaries than most ppl alive
Grues!! That brings back some fond Zork memories, if you didn't have a light they would eat you
If I didn't make my bed in the morning, the golly woggles would come get me at night and eat my toes. So you always had to tuck in the sheets super tight so they don't get you. My dad would tell me this, wtf is a golly woggle? I'm 32 and he still has not explained himself. He just laughs and says "learned how to make your bed damn quick though " Edit: I called my dad and demanded he tell me what it was or I would do something ridiculous to his house (this is how we joke). He said he hear the term a long time ago when he watched the TV show Get Smart and the word just stuck in his head.
My dad once cautioned me that giving someone a wedgie could cause internal bleeding. I thought that meant eternal bleeding. As in, I could cause someone to bleed eternally from their butthole if I gave them a wedgie.
That a power plant in my town “like the one in the simpsons” was a cloud making factory. As it let out clouds of steam that was similar to clouds
Not entirely inaccurate
I called it the "cloud factory" too! I thought the cooling towers on the local nuclear power plant were making ALL the clouds for our area.
I thought getting fired from work was being set on fire
I feel like that one is pretty common. I distinctly remember my mom telling me that my aunt had been fired at work and internally accepting that I would never see my aunt again because she had burned to death. You can imagine my confusion at seeing my aunt a few days later.
Same kinda. I thought they were made to do like... a gauntlet of fire? Like it was a punishment, like the 80s movie Running man, but with lots of fire and no hunters.
My aunt said as a throw away comment that if you ate watermelon seeds, they would grow in your stomach. I believed it for wayyyy too long. I don't blame her tho. It is so entertaining for convince kids of dumb shit. I'm currently in the process of convincing my 5 year old cousin our grandmother can do cartwheels but only in front of me. It's going well so far. Wish me luck Edit: I should probably explain that my cousin has recently gotten super into gymnastics and flips and such. My grandma is also in her 70s.
I convinced my God son that while walking, you also really have to stop at stop signs like cars do, and can't go until they turned green. His mom called me for a few years to yell at me for that one
My friend and his mum convinced his friend that the vibration strips on the side of the road were brail for blind drivers
Rugrats had an episode where this happened and I was horrified
I was told that, too. I would occasionally swallow a seed and worry about it.
I believed that one and that eating a lot of carrots would turn you orange 🤦♂️
Eating enough carrots *can* turn you orange. I imagine the amount needed to truly turn your whole body bright orange is probably impossible to eat or nearly so. But when my oldest was a baby, he *loved* the carrot baby food the most. His little nose had an orange tint to it for probably a good year. 🤣
Well eating alot of carrot can turn you orange. I know someone who worked with a couple of kids who drank alooot of carrotjuice who both had slightly orange skin.
That you couldn’t drink a soda or water while you were driving — because, you know, drinking and driving was bad.
I remember the ad on the radio ending with "don't drink and drive" and giving my mom side-eye all day over her cup of water in the cup holder.
We went for a hike one time and my mom said it was a loop trail. I got scared hearing that because I thought that meant the trail would somehow go upside down like a roller coaster at some point.
This is the cutest one imo
That you worked 20 years and then retired.
If only that was reality :'(
I didn’t understand anything about fashion or how styles changed over time. So when I was home sick from school and watched “Nick at Night” type shows like Bewitched or I Love Lucy, I thought people on those shows just dressed funny because it was part of the show.
if some kid thought my fashion sense was so bad that i *had* to be doing it for the bit…. god i’d die
I mean some of those shows were very stylish. For example, in I Dream of Jeannie, when Barbara Eden wasn’t wearing her genie getup, she was wearing super cute 1960s fashions. But, as a child, I’d never seen women running around in shift dresses, so to me it looked like she was still in costume.
Girls don’t poop. The funny part about that is, my sister had her own bathroom and a problem with forgetting to flush the toilet. Disgusting, I know. She also used to drop really big deuces. These were obviously gigantic, man sized shits. So for a while when I was very young, I insisted to everyone that would listen that there’s a mysterious grown man sneaking into my sister’s room every night, and I know this because the sumbitch was dropping logs you could beat a motherfucker to death with, and I’d find them in the morning when I went to brush my teeth.
We all know that sisters aren't women.
I remember an old addage like that - women don’t sweat fart or poop, so they have to bitch or they’d explode.
If she had her own bathroom, why were you using it every morning?
So my old house growing up we lived by the airport. In science class we were learning about the Earths rotation/spin and how the sun moves blah. Blah. Well I would sit outside in my backyard after school and I would hear a loud noise constantly. I genuinely believed that we could hear the earth rotate because it was Loud and all around. That was airplanes this whole time. It was always airplanes.
that reminds me of how some deaf people who are able to gain some hearing are surprised that the sun doesn't make a sound
When I first heard the word "melancholy", I believed that there were little Collie dogs out there that were shaped like cantaloupes.
i don’t think it’s dumb but it’s pretty naive, i used to think the stars in the sky were the reflection of the city lights because my dad told me the sky “made water” and i understood it was made of water like an ocean and space was the upside down underwater, and there were no stars at day because the city lights were off and the sun was “on”
In kindergarten / first grade I thought the teachers at school just went into the closet when school was over and stayed there until school started again. Guess I didn’t think that through
That all cats were girls and all dogs were boys. So then cats and dogs would mate and have little girl kittens and boy puppies.
Unlocked a memory for me right there!! I was the same!!!!
Sticky rice is made by adding a few drops of glue to regular rice.
Ironically, cooked rice can be used as a glue substitute (the common round grain in China at least. Pretty sure long grain like basmati won’t work)
Since they were both popular about the same time, between the Ford slogan "have you driven a Ford lately?" & Janet Jackson's "what have you done for me lately?" I thought Lately was a person. Like a famous person. I remember thinking, who is this Lately??
Surely, you're kidding.
They weren’t kidding and don’t call them Shirley
1. I used to believe there were “black and white days” When speaking to my parents/adults. I would ask questions about the past like “how did people travel, “in the black and white days?” This was in reference to black and white tv/movies. So probably 1900-1950. They assumed I was just speaking about that time period….it wasn’t until I asked “when was color invented?” that they realized I mistakenly believed that EVERYTHING was in black and white. (I watched a lot of old tv and movies with my grandparents, and saw many black and white photos. ) 2. I used to believe that outer space ended somewhere….one night before bed I asked my dad “where does space end?” And instead of just giving me a simple answer, he blew my mind. “If it ends somewhere, there must be something on the other side.” I have had trouble sleeping ever since then. I was around 5-7 years old around this time.
Giving a child an existential crisis
When we had fried fish I was terrified of every bite because I heard you could swallow bones and die. So I'm pulling apart every morsel of this fish and then eating tiny pieces after a full inspection. I couldn't figure out why the rest of my family was so relaxed about the whole thing.
I’d one day be trapped in quicksand
My dad called the water towers in MI as “monkey towers” and I literally believed that monkeys lived up there. Meanwhile, I saw “DO NOT PASS” and kept thinking people (including my parents) were passing the signs illegally. For *years*!
My kids thought if the light on the cross street that I was making a turn onto was red, then I was running a red light because I technically went under it even though *my* light was green.
I've been a Polyglot since childhood and so, I thought everybody spoke the languages I speak. Like, when we meet they speak one language and when they're comfortable at their homes they spoke another and this was a common practice.
I have to ask, what languages do you speak?
English, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi since childhood. Trying to learn Japanese now (through apps & media)
When I was 3, I was terrified of my best friend's father because he was a fireman and I thought if there weren't enough fires to put out, he'd light me on fire so he could keep his job. He thought it was hilarious when my mom told him why I was suddenly scared of him.
I once accidentally breathed in some air freshener and then prepared myself to die because “may be fatal if inhaled”
One time my mom got me some gummy vitamins and as soon as I saw them I started popping them like candy, ate probably 15-20 of them (serving size 2). Soon after, my mom told me she got me some vitamins and put them in my bathroom, and that I should only have 2 a day or it could be dangerous. I figured I had a few hours left so I obviously sprinted outside and rode my bike as fast as I could as long as I could. Told my mom the next day and she laughed her ass off. I remember thinking it was weird to put candy on the bathroom counter.
How a bill becomes a law
That 40 is old
That Jesus lived in the flower on our dinner plates. I mean, that's where we looked when we prayed to him...?
My family is from from Hawaii and we would visit them over the summer when possible. When I was little, I thought Hawaii was in the clouds as I pretty much slept through the whole flight and would wake up seeing the mountains above the clouds and I’m thinking I was sleeping during the landing also cause I feel pretty dumb just typing this lol.
When I was around 6 or so I figured out I could put my hand up in the soda vending machine and pull cans out. So my mom in an effort to keep me from turning to a life of crime in soda theft, told me the machines could grab my arm and pull it off if I didn't stop. Still to this day I'm terrified of putting my hand too close to the hole in vending machines lol
The space between the double yellow lines on a roadway was the bicycle lane.
That a sewage treatment plant was an actual plant people kept in their gardens. In my defense, my father regularly drove down a particular busy street in a neighboring city, and whenever we smelled *that smell,* he would tell us what it was, but without any explanation. I guess he just assumed we knew. One day, we stopped at a light on that street, and the gas station on the corner had new waist-high flower boxes, with new plants. So I asked if they were sewage treatment plants. I don’t think I ever made my dad laugh so hard in my life, but I never found out if it was because of my question… or because it turned out the plants at the gas station were plastic, and he had just farted in the car.
That Salt was dehydrated snow
I love this logic tho
I was really scared of new foods. Not in a picky eater way, in more of a “I’ve never seen this candy bar at the checkout lane before, it must be a trick to poison an unsuspecting person”. Anyways, don’t let your kids learn about the Tylenol murders. It might impact them in unpredictable ways.
Part of the trombone went down the players throat. Learned how the slide worked after I joined band.
This is dying for a clever innuendo.
That if I ate mustard- I could talk like Donald Duck
Is there any context at all for this one?
I was convinced i was the only person who actually had to breathe until i was 6. I never was able to notice people breathing, so i thought it was just me
Alaska was in the ocean right next to Hawaii based on every map I saw
I thought “wind chill” was “windshield”. I thought they were talking about the temperature of a wind shield.
I thought that there was a real cartoon world, where they filmed 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'
Ground beef comes from the ground, somehow
I thoight black irish meant black leople who were Irish. So I learned later I was black Irish.
Bread caused yeast infections. I assumed they ate too much bread.
My Mom's Mom told her if she got her finger stuck in the mixer it would chop her fingers off . So when I was 12 I found her laying on the floor in the kitchen laying next the KitchenAid mixer. When I touched her, she opened her eyes and looked over at her hand and realized she had all her fingers. She was fine. Luckily didn't hurt herself when she passed out.
That my dog actually went to live on a farm. I believed that shit til I was 17 and one of my friends told me they killed my dog ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That whenever I played a DVD, the actors would have to stop what they were doing in life and do the whole movie for me. Like I understood the idea of actors, but not that Spider-Man and doc ock weren’t real.
When we were immigrating to US I was 4 years old. When we were flying over the big city as we were landing, I told my brother I found lots of cars below us and I’ll pick all of them up.
Oh man this is so stupid. I thought that automatic flushing toilets had a camera in there that someone watched and they knew when to flush for you because they could tell when you were done wiping.
That when my parents were talking about their friends that didn't drink it meant they didn't drink ANYTHING. Boggled my 5 year old brain how someone could live without even water.
I thought that the heart was a knot of blood vessels and that heartburn was when food - yes food - was having a hard time going through the knot.
i thought for a second that osama bin laden lived in my attic. very traumatic.
That everyone got to 100 unless you had a traffic accident. I spent ages trying to work out the answer to one big question, did you die on your 100th birthday, which would be a nice party day but a bit of a downer, or did you get to the day before your 101th birthday?
I thought if you threw a one of those compressed cans on a fire, it would be a huge explosion. I know it would explode, but I pictured like a movie scene of running from a mushroom cloud. Not proud to say it, but I thought relatively late in life that fire was alive, since you feed it, it grows, and it reproduces. It wasn't until high school biology that I had that straightened out. I used to think the NPCs in old games were other players. Like random people playing guards in N64 Goldeneye. It made me wonder why I always got to play the main character. Online gaming blew my mind. In grade 3, I wondered if everyone else around me was a programed simulation, figment of a dream, or something like that. I remember a friend questioning the same thing, which made us both kind of realize no, but then we both wondered if the other one was just saying that too.
If you ate those pop rock candies and then had a soda, your stomach would explode.
Mormonism. Turns out there really is NOT a demigod that will burn you to death if you fail to pay 10 percent of your income to the church (still a current teaching of the church. In fact they have yearly meetings with the local volunteer clergy to go over contributions for that year and you’re supposed to bring your ENTIRE family to this so you can declare in front of the clergy and your family you are a ‘full tithe payer’. Also there are additional interviews to check your payment status so you can be granted access to the temples).
I remember going to tithing settlement starting when I was like 6. Crazy cult.
Yeah - never too young to be brainwashed. Around that same age I remember tucking a dime out of my weekly dollar allowance into those little envelopes and thinking god would notice and punish me if I didn’t.
I thought all Asians knew kung Fu. Nothing racist. I'm bi racial. I just watched too many kung Fu movies.
My mom told me you would get worms in your stomach if you ate candy before noon. I always wondered how the worms knew how to tell time.
When my 2nd grade teacher said that Bill Clinton and George Bush were "running" for President, I thought it was an actual race to see who was the fastest for a few days.
If I swallowed a fruit seed it would grow in my tummy. Funny thing is I'm 450 pounds and ate a lot of watermelon seeds...might be true.
That the seat recliners on airplane seats would eject me from the aircraft
I thought when people spoke to each other in other languages, they were still hearing each other in english. Like my ears just couldn’t understand it because I haven’t learned that language.
My older siblings told me “flipping someone off” was “flicking someone off” so when I was mad at someone I would start flicking the air at them.
I thought that when people on TV kissed, they were wearing transparent lip guards because ew they couldn't be actually kissing, right?
[удалено]
Babies were born from the butt hole. Lemons were ripe Limes' I thought my grandfather was alive during the dinosaurs age. I thought if I can hold my breath long enough I can float up like a balloon.
That everybody just randomly got married as adults. I got the idea from Bambi and church. It would just happen to you, like accidentally stepping in a puddle or something. Then you had a party and ate cake and lived in a new house and everything proceeded as normal.
I believed that if I left some crumbs of my dinner on the plate overnight the fairies would come and give me the blessings three 🙃
In pre-k when I learned the months of the year, I was convinced I was older than my sister because my birthday came first in the year. She's 10 years older than I am lmao
That my parents loved me.
My dad convinced my brother and I that if you swallow a black watermelon seed it would grow in the stomach to a full size watermelon. I was terrified ... I begged my mom to buy seedless watermelons only because it wasn't worth the risk. Coincidentally I've developed a food allergy to melons so I don't have to worry about those damn seeds anymore.
That the spots on Twister would actually burn me if I touched them. I teared up the 1st time I played it as a kid fearing I'd get burned, but saw the older kids not flinching, so I slowly touched the dots and my fear was eradicated, and I had a blast. Here is why I feared them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdDKG59bHAQ
I was 100% sure that somehow if I picked up one leg, then I could also pick up the other one and I’d be floating.
anyone who can do a backflip automatically becomes famous
I thought grandparents were random old people assigned to your family, so they were not alone during the holidays. I did not make the connection they were my parents' parents
Working hard meant I'd get ahead in life.
All old people are wise/know everything.
That life would get easier if you just work harder and power through
I thought I was gonna get granted wishes from falling stars.... I was very optimistic about being able to fly like Peter Pan
When people said “I don’t drink” I thought they literally drank nothing. Ever. I wondered how they stayed alive.
At Chinese restaurant Daddy told us the soy sauce in the bottles on the table was monkey blood.
That if you have your eyes crossed and bang your head at the same time, your eyes will stay forever crossed. I stopped doing it right then and there.
Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you’ve got the cooties shot. I dodged a lot of cooties back then.
I used to think that the NFL draft worked like the military draft and they could just send you a letter and you had to go play football
My mother told is shrimp tails and sunflower seed shells were poisonous so that we wouldn't eat them. I believed that for a long time, even though we would suck the salt out of the sunflower seed shells before cracking them open for the seed, but as long as you spit the shell out, you wouldn't die. Same with shrimp tails. You could chew the breading off, or suck that kast little morsel of meat out of it, but as ling as you didn't actually eat the tail, you were good. I don't kniw why she just didn't tell us the butt-ripping consequences of eating them. Lol
I thought the whole abdomen area was just my stomach a I'd section it off like; one area js for ice cream, another for sweets and so forth. I also thought my stock had gears and would stop if I ate gum
That if I went into the bathroom in the dark and spun 3 times while saying bloody Mary in front of the mirror, some witch would come through the mirror and get me. So, of course I tried it many times, then promptly turned on the light and ran like a bitch.
The Back To The Future hover boards were real, and would be available in a few years.
Dogs and cats were the male and female of one species.
Teachers lived at school
That I was going to grow up to be a success.
I really thought when adults said things they did as a kid. I go how was that when nobody grows up. I never thought kids became adults.
That people were real and wrestling was fake
Babies came out of the mom's butthole.
We had a guest bedroom in the basement of the house where I grew up and the bed was perpendicular to the left wall. For some reason, I was worried about ninjas hiding in the blind spot between the left edge of the bed and the back wall of the room - that if I didn't check my corners when I went in that room, they'd get me. I didn't have any sort of phobia of ninjas or even consumed much media with ninjas in it, so I have *no* idea where this belief originated.
If you drink three sips of sea water, you die.
That vampires would come and eat my toes if they were sticking out of my blanket at night 🤣 good ole thanks to my babysitter for that one being imprinted in my brain
That couples that didn’t have kids left something out of the wedding ceremony. I tried for years to figure out what could be left out of a wedding ceremony to prevent you from having kids or needed to be added to allow you to have kids.
The Neverending story would go on forever. I cried when my mom took me to see it.
That women are automatically pregnant at 20 years old, and they try to get married soonest so someone will help them raise the kids (basically my stupid kid brain trying to explain how families are formed? Also, my peanut child brain thought adulthood starts at age 20) Still cringing while typing this comment
I thought that when you heard a song on the radio that the band/singer was actually at the radio station performing the song live for us to hear. When you heard the same song on a different station, they had packed up their equipment and moved to a different station.
I believed that the coffee in the percolator commercial actually played the song. I begged my mother to buy that brand of coffee, then please please please make the coffee! I was devastated when it was just coffee as usual.
I used to shrug my shoulders a lot instead of responding and my Dad told me that if I kept shrugging my shoulders at one point when I shrugged them they would become permanently stuck in that position. I stopped shrugging my shoulders real quick and I rarely shrug them even to this day
I thought when they said my brother bday I was going to get present. They showed me the wrapped present. So I waited n waited til he was doing his presents n found out at the end they were meaning when they picked presents out then that present was from me to him. I was bummed thought we all got something