Back in the days of scraped knees, colorful lunchboxes, and the unshakable belief that eating vegetables could turn you into a superhero, our youthful minds were an endless source of wonder. Childhood was a time when our imaginations knew no bounds, but it was also a phase marked by some, well, let’s say, peculiar notions. In this delightful journey down memory lane, we invite you to join us as people from all walks of life candidly share the most side-splittingly silly beliefs they held during their early years. Get ready to chuckle, reminisce, and maybe even cringe a little at the hilarious and endearing world of childhood beliefs.
When I was younger, my mom (who honestly believed this) always told me that whenever there was a thunderstorm, milk that was outside the fridge would turn sour almost right away. I was at a friend’s house this one time and a huge thunderstorm started going, he had 2 packs of milk on his table. Being a good friend, I threw them away immediately. He gave me the weirdest look.
I remember throwing a fit right before first grade started because I believed that the reason I was not a grown-up was because my parents wouldn’t let me. I had the idea in my head that everybody else from pre-school were now grown-ups and drove their cars and went to their jobs and I was still a kid because my parents were forcing me to be one.
This is coming from the time when VHS tapes were still a thing and you had to rewind them to the beginning of the film each time you wanted to watch your favourite film again.
When I was younger, I used to think that the people on the television screens were alive and needed my help to get them out of their predicament (too much of Dora talking to me) and as a way that I helped them, and truly believed, was to rewind the video all the way back to the beginning so that the heroes would be able to know what was going to happen so that they would be able to prevent it.
Needless to say, I was always upset why they never learned from their mistakes…still didn’t stop me.
So my brother’s name started with an H and my name starts with a C. When I was little I only ever used cold water out of the faucet because I thought the H water was for my brother and the C water was for me.
I used to think my mom was such a good shopper. She would pick out all these groceries, and when she got up to the checker, she would only give them one piece of money, and they would give her several pieces of money back AND we got to keep the groceries.
Lived in Germany for a few years, and my Dad convinced me that windshield wipers were called “flippenflöppen muckenschpreaders” (this was pre-Google translate)
That there’s a tiny human inside the TV who executed what the remote was telling him to do. For example, when you press the button to increase the volume, he is being hit in a specific way that lets him know that he has to go and manually increase the volume.
The inside of my stomach was another village with its own villagers. Every time I drank, it rained. Every time I ate, it fed the people. A tummy ache was because the villagers were unhappy.
I used to believe that night is brought about by clouds – dark ones, of course. Never felt the need to clarify this with anybody, it was an obvious fact
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.
Once when I was young I noticed a bottle of soda on top of the fridge after all other groceries had been put away. Inquiring about it, my dad said it had been dropped and they were worried it might explode.
I laid awake all night envisioning the house being consumed in a massive fireball.
That if people are going to study something they just sit in a circle with other students and think about what they want to do. As soon as they find out, they are done and they can leave.
For some reason, I thought every car that was made had to do a crash test. Probably because my dad once told me that our car had a very good rating in the crash test.
I was amazed by the fact that all the cars were repaired so well before being sold.
I thought that there would be a baby inside every girl’s stomach as soon as she is born and inside that baby’s stomach too there would be a tiny baby(the cycle goes on and on)and that the baby keeps growing as we grow and after getting married the doctors will cut the stomach and take the baby out to make space for another baby.
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 in.
When I was really young, I was convinced I was pregnant (I’m a man btw), with a baby cat named Bridget. My family decided to see how long I would believe this so they never told me how ridiculously impossible that was. I went on believing it for about 5 months (that’s how long little I thought cat pregnancy lasted), and then when the baby never came, I went to my mom and asked when Bridget would be born, she finally told me that boys can’t get pregnant and humans can’t give birth to cats. I was traumatized, little me was so excited to be a cat father, and then it was ripped away from me. I was such a stupid kid.
I believed hamburgers and hotdog buns were only available for restaurants, not “civilians”. Mom used sliced bread (toasted to obliterate the gums) at home to make burgers and hotdogs. I believed that until the age of 10.
This is embarrassing – I thought that dream “bubbles” (like the ones you see in cartoons) were real. Every time I needed to wake my sister up, I thought I could interrupt her sleep by waving my hands like a maniac above her head so she would stop dreaming and wake up. Never worked, continued to do it anyway on the off chance it would.
We lived in my great aunt’s house for a while when I was a kid and my parents were getting back onto their feet and there was this heater in the living room. It had a little window where you could see the pilot light in there and when I was a kid I was fascinated by it. I thought that because the flame was blue it would be cold to the touch. It sort of makes sense, but it was incredibly stupid considering this flame was keeping a heater going. One day I decided to stick my fingers through this little chip in the glass to test it out. The flame was not cold, it was hot like regular fire and burned me, luckily not too bad though.
I asked my mom once why people had gray hair. Without missing a beat, she simply said, “From having kids.” For many years I thought there was some biochemical process after having kids that caused one’s hair to turn gray.
I eventually learned differently. Also figured out where I got my propensity for smarta**ery.
I was very very young and I blamed the Wizard of Oz but I believed that a tornado was just one big phenomenon that continuously happened and spun from state to state country to country. I also live in the south so we have frequent tornado warnings so I vaguely remember a time we had two or three warnings in one week and I was scared the “single tornado” would come to our town and never go away.
That I would have to change my name when I grew up.
I don’t know why, but I thought my name was suitable for a child but definitely not for an adult, and I couldn’t imagine (being) an adult with my name. I even talked to my mother about it, saying that at some point we’d eventually have to go to court to have it changed to something more “adult-sounding”.
Do you remember the commercial where they planted Skittles in the ground and a rainbow grew? Well, when I was a kid my parents convinced me it was true, but took longer than the commercial showed. For about a month or two I tried very hard to grow a rainbow in my backyard, watering it when I would get home from school. Eventually, they told me the truth and now as an adult, I feel like I would find that pretty to do to my kid too.
I have a LONG list of dumbness from my childhood but this one stands out.
My mother had just had the “profanity” talk with me stating that people only use it because they can’t think of anything else to say and it just shows how ignorant you are.
Fast forward a few days and I am with my mom at Blockbuster. We were picking up movies and the lady at the register said there was a fee my mom had to pay first because one of the last movies we had was not returned. Now our Blockbuster return record was IMPECCABLE, IMMACULATE even. So my mom calmly explained it must be a mistake as we have been using the Blockbuster for years and have always returned our rentals on time or early. The woman refuses to check and says well the computer says this so you pay for this. My mom again, calmly states her case and implores her to check.
What happened next? The girl not so indirectly accuses my mom of stealing it and sprinkles a little racism on top saying something about that is what she has seen most people “like us” do. Well, my mom leans in and says through gritted teeth… “You listen here little girl…” and what followed was such an eloquent display of filth and weaponized dialogue that what little bit of vile language I called myself using just a few days ago seemed foolishly inadequate and amateurish in comparison.
And here I go, at the height of my mom’s verbal battery of this woman, tugging at her arm. She tries to ignore me. I tug more. She tries to yank her arm away. I hold tighter and yank more. Finally, my mom turned to me and said “WHAT!?” in a tone that most with common sense would interpret as “Nevermind” being the ONLY acceptable answer. But here I go, looking dead into her enraged eyes, straightening up my little body and said quite smugly.
“Momma, you said only ignorant people use curse words.”
I wasn’t afraid of being on a plane and it crashing because I thought that as long as I could get to the window/door quickly, I could just jump out the second before it hit the ground.
My dad taught me that to change the TV channel you use a “remolt” rather than a “remote”. I knew that remote was a word, but remolt was also a separate word- what you used for the TV. I believed this up until l was 17 when I forced my high school boyfriend to look it up in the dictionary to prove he was saying it wrong. My dad still finds this hilarious.
I thought all commercials and shows were live. Like actors were literally standing by to do the same commercials over and over again in between the show.
When I was 10, I found it painful to chew on one side of my mouth. So I just chewed on the other side. Never mentioned it to my parents or anything. In my head, I thought that just as I am more proficient with writing with my right hand, I am more proficient at chewing with the one non-painful side of my mouth.
My mom convinced me that if you swallow gum, you’ll fart out these big balls of gum that you couldn’t pop, and showed me a picture of people on training balls and said they were trying to pop the gum. This just made me swallow gum more to try to get it to happen.
My dumb*ss legit thought people could get pregnant by kissing. Not that surprising for say, a seven-year-old, but I was 14 when my freshman health teacher had to explain to this dumb teenage girl that yes, you can kiss your boyfriend and not worry about a baby.
The worst part? I have a huge family, I’m the sixth of seven kids. When I brought this up to my parents at twenty they were shocked. They had given the talk to all my siblings, even my little brother. THEY FORGOT TO GIVE ME THE TALK.
I thought everybody lived to be exactly 100 years old. I’m not sure why but I just thought that was the universal cut-off age. I carried that belief from when I first conceptualized death until around kindergarten when I realized that was not correct. I probably had other beliefs that were just as dumb, if not dumber, but this came to mind first.
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 kid logic 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 into 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.”
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.
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 someday because my mom put her hand over the phone and asked me if I wanted kids someday 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.
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 an 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”.
Everyone in my family has blue eyes but me. My [older] brother convinced me that my hazel eyes came about while I was sleeping one night. An elf lifted one of my eyelids and crapped in it, and his wife crapped in the other.
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 to trade me in for a kid who didn’t yell so much. Never shouted in the car again. Also didn’t trust that Goodwill face logo for many years.
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 poisonous.
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, and 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 that all buildings were slowly sinking into the ground because of how heavy they were, and that’s why archeologists have to dig up ancient buildings.
I thought women got pregnant through their wedding rings. I thought that the diamond in every ring contained some magic baby serum that would be injected into the bride’s finger once the ring was put on her finger, thus resulting in pregnancy. I thought you could bypass having kids by just not getting married lol
I thought that every object had emotions. I spent so much of my d*mn time making sure my curtains were happy and that all of my stuffed animals were equally loved, so I wouldn’t hurt any of their feelings.
I thought making anything in the kitchen required eggs, flour, and sugar and all that, after making cookies and cakes with my mom. One day she walked in on me trying to make chocolate milk that way.
My mom told me if I stared into the microwave while food was cooking I would turn into a Mexican. It terrified me as a 4-year-old Midwestern white kid from a town of 300, who did not know what a Mexican was, but I sure as sh*t didn’t want to be one. I never stared into one again until I randomly remembered that one day and thought, wait what the f*ck
Really she just didn’t want me to be in the way and stare at the food cooking, but she could have said literally anything else. The microwave could have burned my eyes out or something. Still dramatic. The joke’s on her tho, when I grew up I was in a serious relationship with a lovely Mexican man (naturally born, not made from microwaves and sh*t).
I overheard my Mom talking on the phone, either to or about a friend of hers from work. I wasn’t clear on that, but from what she said I gathered that her friend was a Fireman because she was so good at Arts and Crafts. Yeah, right? I don’t know where that came from, but in my head that was one of the things you had to learn to be a Fireman, you had to be good at Arts and Crafts.
So sometime after that, we visited this friend of hers for supper. I saw some of her crafts and decided that she was probably a good enough Fireman. I was puzzled as to who used the bedroom though, because I was sure she had to sleep in the firehall at night. During the meal, the sound of firetrucks went by a few blocks away. She just kept talking to my Mom without showing any reaction to the noise. I expected her to jump out of her chair and get ready to run out to fight the fire.
Finally, I spoke up, “Aren’t you going to go help them fight the fire?”
She and my Mom looked at each other and then at me. “What?” I tried explaining that she was supposed to go fight the fire because it was her job. I pointed at a ceramic plant holder as evidence of her firefighting abilities.
When I was 9, my sister-in-law was pregnant with my niece. Because I thought that labor day was a day that every woman who was still pregnant went into labor, I predicted my niece being born on labor day.
Jokes on them, she was born on Labor Day. I’m f*cking psychic.
When I was younger, say around 6 years old, my aunt M&Ms were named after her. According to her story, she (whose initials are MM) used to date an amateur chocolate maker who one day made the infamous candies and named them after her because he loved her so much.
I went around telling EVERYONE at school and believed it for the longest time. It wasn’t until recently that I told her that and she died laughing – b*tch had completely forgotten about the whole lie she told me hahaha goes to show what kind of things kids really remember.
I thought I could bring the moon home by staring at it. Every time I’d see it outside the car window I’d try so hard to keep looking at it and it did feel like it was following me. I felt really proud whenever I’d get home and the moon was still there. I actually thought I brought it home with me.
In 1st grade, we were learning all about Japan and its culture. At that age, I had no comprehension of other languages. So when the teacher tells us that “The Japanese write their language in the opposite direction.” I assumed that meant Japanese is just English in reverse, but I wanted clarification because that just seemed so weird.
Me: “So Japanese is just the opposite of English?”
Teacher: “Er…that’s right it’s written backwards.”
Okay, so I stirred that around in my head for a minute and decided I needed an example. Wouldn’t you know it, of all the words I could have picked, I picked “Egg.”
Me: “So the Japanese word for “egg” would be “gay”?
(I didn’t know what gay was or that it was even a word, I was just pronouncing “egg” backwards to make it Japanese)
Teacher: “What?“
Me: (Thinking she hadn’t heard) “I was asking if “egg” is pronounced “gay” in Japanese.”
Teacher: “Excuse me?“
Me: (Frustrated at her apparent deafness, I practically yelled it out) “Is the word “egg,” like from chickens, pronounced in Japan as “gay”?”
Teacher: (Gives me a long cold stare) ….No. (Continues with other lesson)
I sat there wondering what the heck her problem was and never did figure out how to say “egg” in Japanese. It didn’t dawn on me what exactly her deal was until many many years later. I still wonder what she must have thought of me at that moment.
My mum told me that the ‘beeping sound’ that happened when we drove under toll points was her communicating with the aliens. She’d be like ‘I’m going to speak with the aliens now’ and make a beep sound with her voice just before going under so it sounded like it was speaking back to her.
That RIP was the most unfortunate name ever because almost every headstone in the cemetery had the name ‘RIP’. Told my mother, “People really need to stop naming their kids Rip. Look at all these dead Rip’s!!” I think that was when she decided I wouldn’t need a college fund.
When I was little, I believed planes would land and pull up at your house. Whenever my grandpa (that lives 12 hours away) would travel by plane, I assumed that the plane would just drop him off like a bus would.
One time I was so excited to see him that I invited my friend to sit by the driveway all day to wait for the plane to pull up and I was disappointed when I saw my dad with grandpa in the car with him.
I used to think that if someone took off their wedding ring, it was some sort of signal to their spouse that they wanted a divorce. I pretty much had anxiety every time my mom did the dishes. Turns out I was right cuz a few years later my parents divorced.
When I was five or six, my mom got appendicitis and had to have emergency surgery to have it taken out. It was during the summer in Wisconsin, so everyone tried to swim as much as possible for the 9 weeks they could do so without getting hypothermia.
So, my mom obviously wasn’t allowed to swim for a while after her surgery, which also meant I couldn’t go swimming either, since she couldn’t go in the water.
After a few weeks of asking to go swimming and my mom said “No, honey, I had my appendix taken out, remember?” I looked up at her and said
“Mom, when you get your appendix back in, can we go to JoAnnie’s waterpark?”
I mean, as a kid, it really made sense. I was told over and over that I couldn’t do something because my mom had her appendix taken out, so, naturally, I should be able to when it gets put back in, right?
I was 6 years old, and about to be baptized. In my Sunday school class, we had learned that when someone is baptized, the old, sinful soul dies and is washed away, and we are reborn in Christ. I insisted on going first because I didn’t want to be baptized in water with dead souls floating around.
I thought that the people in the photographs could really see us.
It manifested itself when I brought home my class photograph from elementary school. I proudly displayed it on my dresser.
Then one day while I was getting clothed I looked at the photograph and thought “Oh no, they can see me!!.”
I spent a few weeks and months getting dressed under my bedsheets and covers.
I even remember having the conscious thought “If they can see me, why can’t I see them? This doesn’t make any sense”, but that still didn’t deter my thoughts.
When I was three or four I poured a bowl of soup onto my one-year-old brother’s head while he was eating cheerios in his high chair. (Don’t worry, it wasn’t hot and he didn’t get burned, just really really annoyed.)
When our mom rushed into the kitchen to see what was the matter, I told her that it was raining soup in the kitchen. My tiny little four-year-old brain actually believed she’d fall for it.
If I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. I would ‘hide’ under tables to do things I wasn’t supposed to do, just turning my back on the adults. One time I was sick and wasn’t supposed to be eating ice cream. We had a dinner party and had set up bowls of ice cream for sundaes. I snatched one and dove under the table and went to town on it. I turned around, face covered with melted ice cream to the curious gaze of people.
“What?” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “I wasn’t eating ice cream.”
My best friend’s older brother told me that people with high cholesterol levels had to get their hands amputated because cholesterol blocked the blood flow to their hands. He also told me that cold hands are a symptom of high cholesterol. I begged my mom to take me to the doctor on several occasions just because my hands were cold. I honestly thought I was going to be handless at 11. F*ck that guy!
I had a book about a girl who would put on a special shark tooth necklace and transform into a mermaid.
Five-year-old me had big aspirations to be a mermaid-doctor-vet (I would treat humans in my human form and fish and sea creatures in my mermaid form), so obviously this shark tooth necklace was a vital part of my future.
There were numerous attempts by my parents to try and appease me with fake shark tooth necklaces, but five-year-old me wasn’t buying it. I needed a real shark tooth from a real shark.
My father pulled a small shark on board and I scrambled towards the shark. This was my chance to become a mermaid. I shoved my hand towards the very live and unhappy shark. My mom pulled me back just in time and locked me in the cabin until the shark was back in the water.
I actually still have a scar on my hand because my hand did make contact with a tooth as my mom pulled me away.
Back at the marina, my parents gave me a massive lecture about how dangerous and stupid that was. I was usually a very shy and timid kid, but I fought back on that, claiming the “shark was trying to give me his tooth because he chose me to be a mermaid and he gave me a mark on my hand so he could find me again”. Every time we went fishing after that, I would sing out “mermaid calls” trying to locate my shark friend.
Unfortunately, I was never reunited with my shark friend, and I did not become a mermaid.
When I was younger, my mother told me that she went to school with Oprah (yes, Oprah Winfrey). My mother who is 100% Pakistani, and went to school in Karachi. Back then it didn’t occur to me that Oprah probably hadn’t even come near Pakistan, let alone had gone to school there growing up. But my dumb little 8-year-old a** believed her. 🙂
And to top it all off, I told everyone in my school and paraded on that fact for a couple of years. That taste of fame was great, not even gonna lie.
I’m pretty sure nobody else thought this, but when I was younger, I thought love was a form of energy (gas, nuclear, solar, etc……that kind of thing). I somehow thought the literary theme “Love conquers all” and “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed” could be combined and I tried looking at a possible equation to figure it out.
I think what I was thinking of was the adrenaline feeling some people get around loved ones, but thought it could be utilized in different ways.
Middle school was weird.
Also, I had posted this on my old account if this somehow sounds familiar to anyone.
In elementary school, a classmate of mine told me his father was a scientist and that the sun would absorb the earth and we would die in a horrible fiery death. Being a kid, I thought that was going to be immediate. Summer vacation came and it was an unusually hot summer which led me to cry most nights because I thought the increased temperature meant the sun was growing closer to kill us all. My parents could not convince me otherwise.
That I had a frog in my stomach and I needed to get it surgically removed. My 8-year-old self discovered that when I made a certain movement to my side while doing some weird breathing my body made a “croak” sound. I told/showed my dad out of curiosity. I was not in any pain, but I thought it was weird. He casually tells me “You have a frog in there that you have to get removed. I will make you a doctor’s appointment.” Sounded logical at the time for me. No big deal. Months down the line my dad and uncle are talking about how my cousin broke an arm and how her healing was doing. I interjected, “Dad, did you ever make that appointment for me?” He looked so confused. “You remember, the frog I have in my body?” My uncle and dad busted out laughing soooooo hard that they started to cry because I was so serious. I genuinely believed there was a frog living inside of me and that it was not an urgent situation.
